


We'll Lend Our Hand and Take Our Stance

by MariniDagger



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Domestic, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fluff and Angst, POV Second Person, Romance, Teacher Clarke, Time Skips, military lexa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-12 16:07:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11165325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MariniDagger/pseuds/MariniDagger
Summary: With Jake in the hospital after an accident, Clarke finds herself halfway across the country, waiting tables in a twenty four hour diner. Ties severed from friends and family back home, she finds new comfort in her table of weekend regulars, a makeshift family of soldiers, Lexa the newest recruit in tow.Years later, a relapse from Jake's recovery finally grasps Clarke into making the return trip home. It's not without some company, forcing her to finally unite her past and present lives for the first time since her split second decision to leave.





	1. Past, Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The product of a year long hiatus from fic writing, settling into a new home, and realizing I'm living the stereotype of being a liberal arts grad working in a coffee shop.
> 
> Come tell me how you feel, I've been out of the game for quite some time.  
> commandermari.tumblr.com

When the streets outside quiet, headlights from cars no longer flooding through the windows, the few stragglers from the bar up the road making their way home after last call, the diner becomes your haven. You find safety among the empty seats of the booths tucked against the wall, in the tables scattered throughout the dining room with chairs flipped on top of them, behind the counter rolling silverware in cheap napkins. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but it’s somewhere, and sometimes you think that’s good enough for now.

Your apartment a few miles up the road isn’t much competition, not when your only furniture is a mattress sitting straight on the floor, the cleanest couch Craigslist had to offer for less than fifty bucks, and a couple of suitcases serving as makeshift desks and tables. Too quiet, too empty, too lifeless. Here, there’s always someone to keep things moving, whether it’s Niylah pushing her dad out the door knowing he’ll never stop working for the day if she doesn’t, or Roan the night shift cook finding new ways to go unnoticed sleeping on the clock. Even if it means working ‘til sunrise and rushing off to class the second you clock out, it beats another sleepless night in your bedroom, tossing and turning, unable to shake the feeling that you still can’t call that place your home.

Home might still exist, you remind yourself on the rare nights you have off, when you’re staring at the ceiling above you: your bedroom on the second floor of the Griffin house, with your unmade bed pushed against the wall and piles of laundry scattered along the floor, the adjoining bathroom with the collection of half empty shampoos bottles cluttering up the corner, the cupboards downstairs stocked with your own personal stash of Girl Scout cookies bought from the Lemkin’s daughter Reese up the street. The key to the house still weighs down on your lanyard, but a thought hangs in the back of your mind each time you run your fingers over the grooves that if you ever tried, you’d find it didn’t fit in the lock anymore.

But you won’t go back and try, not after four months of being gone, not when you know everyone’s waiting for you to turn tail and come running back so they can jump on you for leaving in the first place. They’ll never understand why you left, not your mother, not your friends. The only person who might is still lying in a coma, slipping away from you day by day. You try not to think about it, about whether Jake actually heard your goodbyes that day, if somewhere in his unconscious mind he understands why you left, if he’s able to forgive you for leaving his side.

“Hey, Clarke!” Niylah calls from the hostess station near the door, breaking your focus from the mountain of prepped silverware in front of you and your thoughts of what used to be home. “Got your regulars coming in.”

You see them before she even finishes her sentence, three camouflage shroud figures making their way through the dining room to the second to last booth on the far side of the room. From what you’ve heard, the soldiers have been slinking in the diner like this for months now, every Saturday like clockwork, strolling in around two in the morning, pulling patrol caps off their heads, and settling into the same booth. Somehow they’ve become your regulars over the month you’ve been working there, and they might just be your favorites, though it’s not much considering your only other real regular is a cab driver that comes in on weekends and never orders anything besides a cup of coffee and four eggs over easy while he reads the paper from the day before.

Regulars or not, you’re thankful just to have a table to serve, the rest of the diner sitting empty. Having a table means taking orders, and taking orders means waiting on Roan to make sure he doesn’t screw them up. And the ungodly amount of time it takes to make sure a sleep deprived Roan doesn’t wind up making everyone’s eggs scrambled means no time to dwell on things back in DC, on your father’s recovery or lack of, on just how bad of an idea it might have been to plan this whole move to Missouri of all places just to get away from things.

Putting on a brave face, you grab a couple of menus from behind the counter, making your way to the soldiers’ table across the room.

“Come on, you worthless little shit fuckers. Open!”

A greeting doesn’t even form in your mouth before Anya, the lone woman of the group, throws insults at the blinds covering the window above their table. It’s a new sight, Anya with one hand tangled in the cord, the other twisting the wand back and forth, mumbling under her breath as the blinds remain locked in place. You wait, watching the silent giggles her partners Nyko and Ryder exchange as they sit across from her, both wiping the grins off their faces when Anya finally catches on to you waiting, addressing you over her shoulder.

“Is there a god damn trick to these things?”

“And to think they let you work on the artillery I’m supposed to be manning.”

Ryder’s comment earns him a kick to the shin, one that connects when you catch the table bounce slightly beneath them. Unsatisfied by his singling out of her abilities, Anya sinks down in her seat.

“Sorry about that. These ones are kind of busted,” Always have been and probably always will be. You’ve brought the broken blinds up to Niylah before, when the rare shift you work during the daytime leads to a customer complaining about them not being open, but they seem to be the last thing on her mind, not when one of the coffee makers has been on the fritz since you started there. “You guys can move to another table if the view’s that important.”

You’re not sure what could be so important that she needs the blinds open in the middle of the night, if there’s some kind of hidden beauty in a near pitch black parking lot, the only light coming from the small single bulb sconce hanging near the main entrance. Anya waves the offer away, opting to peel the slats of the blinds up and peer outside, surveying the parking lot through the inch tall gap instead.

Ryder declines your offer to send their orders in, claiming a fourth member of their party was on the way and they’d rather wait. You leave them with their cups of coffee, keeping an eye out for their new arrival as you idle around the counter, wondering if they’re the reason Anya’s got her nose in the mini-blinds. Besides Anya’s growing frustration, the soldiers seem content enough, giving you time to pull out your latest assignment for your drawing class and starting up on it again.

It might just be the stupidest, pointless, most infuriating assignment you’ve ever been giving, and considering you wasted your first year and a half in college taking classes at Georgetown that were supposed to set you up for a medical career following in your mother’s footsteps, you’ve already seen more than enough of those. The damn paper bag you’re supposed to be sketching sits crumpled on the counter in front of you, staring at you, laughing at you, calling into question your abilities as an artist with every crinkle and fold stretching across it.

You crumble the bag up again for good measure, telling yourself the eighth draft of this sketch is the last one you’re doing before you hand it in on Monday, nearly all of your shift last night spent on it already. Watching as the bag unfolds itself, you realize this might be the most at peace you’ve felt about your decision to transfer, to drop pre-med programs and scholarships coasting you through graduate school in favor of an art teaching degree and student loans you’ll be up to your eyeballs in until you retire.

Out here, you feel more real, like your identity is more concrete. You’re not Clarke Griffin, daughter of chief of surgery Abby Griffin and senior environmental engineer Jake Griffin, with a career path mapped out sending you to John Hopkins for med school, then right back to DC to intern at the same hospital Abby did. You’re just Clarke, wanting to sit around in classroom all day and teach students about different art techniques, never knowing if you have the next Picasso’s work hanging on the wall behind your desk, more than happy serving people half-burnt hash browns in the middle of the night if it brings you one step closer to that dream.

One step closer means finishing up that damn paper bag, something that gets put on hold again when you catch Anya peeling herself away from the window from the corner of her eye. A few seconds later, the bell above the door chimes, another camouflage decked figure crossing the room and heading straight into Anya’s arm. Ryder and Nyko follow suit, standing and clapping heavy hands on the newest soldier’s shoulder, Anya refusing to let go of her.

You give them a few moments to get their greetings out of the way, Anya letting go of the other soldier and sliding back into their booth, fixing the tilted slat of the blinds now that her watch for the newest arrival is over. She tugs the cap from her head, drawing a tug on the tight bun pulled the back of her head from Anya, the two breaking out in a slap fight that only ends when you approach, menus and a second round of coffee in hand. The others shrug the menus away, always ordering the same plates each time they come in, only their newest member taking the one you offer her with a grateful smile.

“So, took your sweet ass time getting over here, didn’t you?”

Anya’s question earns her an eye roll from the younger woman as she looks over the menu. Your eyes rake over the name embroidered on her jacket: _Woods._ Her friends, you learned their names from running their credit cards through the register every weekend, but only having a last name to her face feels strange, too formal. She looks away from the menu long enough to notice you nearly overfilling the cup in front of her, keeping your gaze with soft green eyes as you try not to scald yourself with the trickle of coffee falling down the side of the pot.

“I’m here now, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, yeah, shut up and decide what you want.”

She turns the single page menu over in her hands while her companions rattle off their orders. Jotting them down is more of a formality than anything else. They’re a gift from the minimum wage gods for someone like you, never having waited tables before in your life until you moved out to Missouri, keeping their orders nice and simple, each of them ordering the same basic breakfast plate with minimal subsitutions: Anya opts for pancakes instead of toast, Ryder goes for turkey sausage instead of bacon, and Nyko passes up hashbrowns for a bowl of plain grits.

Her nose scrunches in concentration as she bites at a piece of dried skin at the corner of her lips. Questions race through your mind as you wait, why she didn’t show up with the rest of the group or why she’s never shown up with them before this.

When she finally decides, you commit her order to memory, on the off chance she’ll be by their sides when they stroll in again next week: the same plate as the rest, pancakes and a side of fruit replacing the usual toast and bacon sides. She whispers a small thanks before handing the menu back and turning her attention to a story Ryder is already halfway through, something about an on base nurse trying to prescribe him ibuprofen for a nasty case of pneumonia.

“Hey!” Behind the pick-up window, you find Roan half asleep, head lolling against his chest after another hour of no orders leaves him with idle hands. He jumps awake at the sound of your fist banging against the metal surface, sending his hair net askew as he catches himself on the prep table, grumbling under his breath while he straightens it back into place. You flash him a shit eating grin, dangling the slip of paper through the window. “Feel like actually doing something for once?”

“Feel like actually not being a pain in my ass for one night?”

You shake your head and he rips the slip from your hand, turning his back towards you to fish out the supplies he needs. You watch for a few seconds as he clicks the heat of the flat top on before you force yourself to turn around, looking back at the paper bag and empty sketch pad waiting for you.

The pencil in your hand weighs heavy as you drag out a couple of lines, forming a shaky outline of the bag on the counter. Memories of DC crash over you, of coming downstairs and finding Murphy and your dad in the kitchen making pancakes, always making sure to cough or “accidentally” bump into one of the dining room chairs before entering the room, buying Murphy enough time to slap a sullen look back on his face and go back to acting like he didn’t enjoy Sunday morning Griffin family breakfasts.

Roan reminds you of him, the two of you bickering back and forth as much as you and Murphy did back home, the brother you never asked for but got anyways after a car accident as a kid took his parents from him, taking Jake’s best friends from college away as well. He found a home in you and Jake and Abby, one sitting in pieces now, leaving you wondering if he’s still right beside Abby holding out hope that it’ll all be okay. Maybe he’s clinging onto hope that there’ll be another Sunday morning with Jake manning the pancakes and Abby setting the table, the two of you too far gone in another argument over whose turn it was this year to lug down the Christmas lights from the attic, just like the last one you held the morning of Jake’s accident.

The person sliding onto one of the barstools at the counter kicks the thought from your mind, of doing dishes and listening to Murphy whine as he makes his way down the steps while Abby takes the phone call that leaves all of your dropping whatever’s in your hands and knocking the breath from your lungs more what felt like hours. Looking up, you find Woods sitting across from you, coffee cup and a phone in hand.

“So I _might_ have gotten banned from our table,” She throws a look over her shoulder towards her former party, Nyko shaking his head and Anya twisting her finger in the air, motioning for her to turn her attention away from them, no longer welcome to listen in on whatever stories they had been telling. “How much of a hassle would it be to get my food over here?”

“I don’t know,” Her eyes flick down to the paper in front of you as you speak, a sudden flush spreading over your cheeks as you follow her gaze. It’s a paper bag worth ten points of your entire grade for the semester, not the damn Mona Lisa, but it still doesn’t stop you from shuffling your bag around and cutting off her silent art critique. “Can’t you tell I’ve got a lot of people fighting for that very spot?”

You gesture to the nearly empty diner, the only other occupants at the counter a lone trucker not wanting to bunker down in his cab for the night, keeping Roan awake with orders of toast every hour or so. Niylah sits at the far end, yelling at Roan through the open door leading to the kitchen between bites of the sandwich she threw together.

“Looks like I’m eating on the curb tonight.”

Roan banging on the counter cuts off whatever response she had, and you could kill him for it, death by choking on that damn paper bag. Instead, you push a caddy of cream and sugar towards the soldier and offer her a refill on the nearly empty cup in front of her. She returns a small smile before you turn to get the plates Roan’s lining along the counter and it throw you off. The quick gesture makes her look softer, even with hair pulled tightly back and her uniform crisp and heavy on her shoulders.

You take a breath before grabbing the plates for her friends, one Roan rolls his eyes at before cleaning off the grill. The word “amateur” makes its way through the window as you walk away, taking careful steps on suddenly uneasy legs, ones you refuse to acknowledge are from the soldier at the counter, even when Niylah raises her eyebrow as you pass.

“You guys need anything else?” Nyko and Ryder shake their heads, already tucking into their plates. Anya unwraps her utensils, pointing a butter knife towards her friend’s back before using it to cut a bite out of her pancakes.

“Tell _that one_ she can come back over when she stops worrying about her damn game so much.”

They fall back into their usual silence as you leave, picking up the last plate from the window and dropping it in front of the woman. Luckily for you, her full attention lies on her phone, and not the half-hearted attempt at a sketch you left unattended. With the volume turned up, she barely realizes there’s a plate of food in front of her until you throw your bag back on the floor, drawing her focus back on you and the uncovered drawing for a few seconds. You pause again after a few quick lines form some of the crinkles on the bag’s surface, the soldier snapping her head back to her phone when she realizes she’s been caught.

“Your friend said you can come back when you’re done with some game.”

You’re not sure what it means, whether they’re overreacting, or she’s got a legitimate addiction to some mind numbing Candy Crush game, one she’s not willing to admit is a problem. Too many nights out with Raven ended with you physically taking her phone away from her in an effort to cut her off cold turkey from her then addiction to Tetris. You figure that same technique hadn’t worked as the soldier looks away from the screen long enough to roll her eyes.

“They don’t know the pain of missing game two of playoff because you’re on duty,” She spears a forkful of eggs, letting them hang in the air as something on the screen draws her focus, cheers of the crowd at whatever game she’s watching muffled by her palm as she holds the phone in front of her. “Especially when the Blackhawks are down going into the game and need to start picking up some slack.”

“You’re passing up on spending time with your friends to watch some game?”

They might not be the most talkative crowd during meals, but it has to beat sitting alone after a long night of doing whatever it is she does. The whole group looked like they were living it up beforehand, laughing at each other’s stories, never falling into a stretch of silence for longer than a few seconds. No game could be worth that loss. It’s one you know all too well, spending meals alone at home whenever you weren’t at the dinner or in one of your study sessions at the library café with the few friends you made in your art history class.

“I’m sensing a little judging here, Clarke.”

“How did you-?”

Looking away from the phone long enough to meet your confused gaze, she taps the name on her own jacket. You look down and find your own nametag, name scribbled in marker on the plain white surface in your own handwriting. The dumbstruck look on your face draws another laugh out of her before she’s back to watching the game, leaving you blushing for the second time that night and considering packing up and moving your things into the walk-in until she leaves.

Her focus rests entirely on the screen again, even putting her fork down after rewatching what must have been either a spectacular or devastating goal for her team, going by the thud of her fist against the counter. With no impending sense of someone needing ketchup, Niylah busy in the kitchen trying to keep Roan from nodding off again and face planting on the still heated grill, you turn back to the sketch, ignoring the small glances she keeps throwing towards you as the sounds of the video pause, you and your drawing becoming her secondary source of entertainment while her game buffers.

Three different attempts at angling the paper bag in better light later, you notice she’s watching you completely. The announcements and constant thuds of fists and silverware on the counter come to an end, and instead of drifting back to the table she’s no longer banished from, she lingers at the counter, taking slow bites of her food as if she’ll miss the final inch of shading from your pencil that turns it into a frame worthy work of art and not something that’ll wind up shoved in your professor’s bag at the end of class.

“Did you need something?”

“Not really. Just wondering if you’re doing that for fun or if it’s some weird artsy expressionist thing I wouldn’t understand.”

Drawing a paper bag a thousand times over just because one tiny corner looked off is the farthest thing from fun that you can imagine. As for the weird expressionist thing, you wouldn’t be surprised if the professor teaching your drawing class does some upper division art class concentrating on how badly a virtually useless inanimate object can make an artist snap, using his class of mostly freshman and sophomores like yourself as guinea pigs.

You’re taken back, questions about your art not something you hear often, especially not when they’re about your intentions for a piece. The compliments, you’re used to, your friends and family knowing you had talent and reminding you of it, but never going beyond than that. Sometimes you think they didn’t want you to feel like your work was ever deeper than a few doodles or a painting thrown together during a lazy week during the summer, as if one conversation about it would send you running off to live a starving artist lifestyle. Joke’s on them in that case, though you wish it wouldn’t have taken you father nearly dying in an accident to push you down that route.

This paper bag isn’t a piece you’re pouring your heart into, not by a longshot. It’s more of a thorn in your side than anything else, a necessary evil standing between you and a mandatory credit towards your degree, but the soldier thinks otherwise. Instead of answering, and crushing whatever ideals she has about your passion for your work, you shrug and nod your head towards her phone, lying face down on the counter in front of her.

“What, your game get too boring for you?”

“Hockey never gets boring,” She takes a sip from her coffee and grimaces. Either it’s been sitting there too long and went cold, or she severely underestimated how strong Niylah’s family’s secret blend is, using nowhere near enough creamer and sugar to make it a little less lethal. You offer her a refill from the steaming pot behind the counter, but she refuses, opting to drop a packet of creamer in the cup instead. “Phone’s dead though, so not much I can do until I get back home.”

“Let me guess, asking one of them is out of the question?”

She turns to look at her former table, her friends’ plates sitting clean and piled in a stack in the middle of the table, right back into their conversations from earlier. By now, they’re usually heading out the door, not much for lingering around in the booth together. But their long missing partner must be a good enough reason to stick around, even if they’ve banned her from sitting with them. She shakes her head as she turns back around.

“Anya’s one of those grumps about phones at the table. She’s been known to crack a couple of screens knocking them out of people’s hands. Ryder isn’t a sports guy, and he knows Anya will be mildly pissed if he goes against her,” She points to Nyko, a frown crossing her face and a sharper tone coming with her words. “ _That one_ is a St. Louis Blues fan, and I’m not even sure how we’re friends between October and June.”

Her words go almost completely over your head. You chalk her distaste up to some kind of deep seated rivalry between their teams, a show of passion you’ve seen one too many times in your own father, when football season rolls around. Your old house sports a Bears flag flying underneath the US flag in the front yard, from the first day of preseason until the team gets knocked out of playoffs, usually much too short of a time for Jake’s liking. He’s known to block people from merging on the freeway if he sees a Packers sticker on their car, or make a few not so discrete passive aggressive comments when they’re out and he sees someone sporting a rival jersey on game day.

By extension, you’re guilty too, carrying on the family legacy with the Bears lanyard sticking out of your bag and the orange and blue decal slapped on the back window of your car, the first thing you added to it, even before you took it in to get the oil leak fixed. This season might be different, Abby and Murphy not being reluctantly dragged into the living room to join in on pre-game rituals for good luck, the house devoid of your twin screams of frustration when the satellite cuts out at the two minute warning and you’re down by three at the seventy yard line. Maybe this year you’ll be stuck settling for calls threatening to blow out the speakers on your phones, if Jake’s even awake to see the games.

“You said Blackhawks, right?” Determined to stop thinking about what used to be home, you turn the tables back on her. The soldier nods, hesitating before taking a second sip of coffee. It’s still strong, judging from the crinkle of her nose, but it’s tolerable. You’ll have to tell Niylah later that someone besides her almost managed to choke down a cup without keeling over. Almost, assuming she still walks out of the dinner at the end of her meal. “Where do they play out of?”

“You’re kidding me, right?” The look of disgust on her face nearly mirrors her coffee reaction, as if you told her you sided with Nyko and rooted for St. Louis. No matter how much you overheard before her phone died, it’s all still Greek to you, football the only sport you can comprehend. Sensing that you’re serious, she shakes her head, letting out a slow breath. “Chicago. That’s in Illinois.”

“I know where Chicago is, thanks,” You’re slightly insulted, as if your lack of knowledge about the sport translates into a lack of basic United States geography. Even if you’ve never set foot in the state, you know where Chicago is and the importance it holds. “My dad’s from there. Born and raised.”

“And you still don’t know who their hockey team is?”

“We’re a football family, okay? I was brought home from the hospital in a Bears onesie. Besides, I thought nobody except Canadians watch hockey.”

“Clearly you’re wrong,” She leans against the counter, sifting through her bowl of fruit for the few chunks of cantaloupe buried in the honey dew. The grapes wind up flicked to an empty part of her plate. “Last time I checked, my birth certificate says I was born in Chicago, too. And here I am.”

She looks down at the phone, blank screen staring back at her. Before you even realize what you’re doing, your phone is in hand, unlocked and extended out to her.

“Here,” You shake it when she doesn’t reach for it right away, in the middle of a bite of her long sought after cantaloupe. “Find whatever you were watching earlier. Just not the whole game. I’ve only got a gig of data to last me another two weeks.”

Her hand closes around the phone, a raise of her eyebrow as a final “Are you sure?” You nod and go back to your sketch, but not without watching from the corner of her eye as she pulls up the same video from earlier, the sound picking up again a few minutes later.

Call it civic duty, a small gesture of thanks towards her for potentially putting her life on the line as a soldier, something a little more meaningful than the ten percent discount she’s already getting on her meal. It’s got nothing to do with the continued excitement stemming from the woman in front of you, the resumed banging of fists at replays of the night’s biggest moves, ending with a grin so wide you’d think she scored the winning goal herself. You catch that much of the commentary to know Brian Bickell scored in overtime to clench the game, quietly hoping he’s one of her favorite players to make the victory that much sweeter.

She’s about to hand your phone back, all grins and pride in a team you know you’ve shown on your own face, when Anya slides next to her at the counter, clapping her on the shoulder and sending her shaking.

“You done yet?”

“Why, did you miss me?”

“Never. You get on my nerves too much,” Anya nods back towards Nyko and Ryder, shaking their heads as they watch the two from across the room. “But those two are requesting your presence. Apparently they’re actually capable of missing you when you leave for four months.”

Four months away warrants her a reaction like that, a full blown special occasion breakfast being held in her honor, even if she spends half of it watching hockey highlights on a stranger’s phone across the room. If you tried the same thing, you’d probably get the cold shoulder. Octavia’s already given you more than that, her last message coming a few weeks ago, wishing you the best and hoping that the bed you’ve made for yourself is cozy enough to burn in, fueled by the bridges you torched by running away and leaving everyone in the dark.

“You know, one day you’re going to slip and admit that you genuinely cherish our friendship, Anya.”

Raven’s a different story, her attempts at communication still trickling in. Nothing compared to Abby though, still leaving voicemails three times a week, sometimes more, those usually featuring a growing slur to her words, one you pick up on in the few seconds you let the message play before deleting it. But Raven goes back and forth, one minute pleading for you to come back home or at least check in with someone, the next sending pictures of your former group’s latest night out, sharing memories as if you were just passing up on the night in favor of cramming for a microbiology exam and not a couple of states away.

“Not a fucking chance. Now hurry up and get back here. I have to tell you about the kid I made piss himself his first night at basic.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” She shoves Anya away before turning back to you, sliding the phone across the counter. “Thank you, Clarke.”

“No problem.”

You fight to think of something else to say before she leaves, but Niylah’s snickering behind you in the kitchen, mumbling with Roan about something that suspiciously sounds like your own name. You clam up knowing they’re listening, unable to do anything more than give the soldier a half smile and turn back to your paper bag in shame. Her question still hangs in your mind, and it just might be the thing you need to push through and get it done.

She leaves with a nod, carrying her coffee back in one hand and the bowl of fruit in the other. When she’s across the room, tucked back in the booth next to Anya, you risk another glance towards them. You catch her in the middle of a story, one complete with a plate and cutlery crafted map covering the table, her hands weaving between the obstacles as her words send Nyko and Ryder into laughing fits. While they catch their breath and Anya rolls her eyes, she returns the look, holding your gaze for a few seconds before turning to Anya as she starts the story she teased minutes before.

 

They stay at the table longer than ever, the four of them alone burning through two more pots of coffee. Even with a small rush of early morning construction workers and a few police officers swinging by before heading out, the soldiers stay seated at the table, going back and forth in telling stories.

The paper bag sketch sits abandoned, having decided it was good enough somewhere between the third and fourth time you made your way over to the table to refill their cups. You almost invite Woods over to give it a second look, but instead you offer to put in another order of food them all. It takes some prodding and a promise on your own life that the apple pie is worth it, even near four in the morning, but the table eventually caves. You catch the quiet “Thank you, Clarke,” the Chicago native throws your way as you drop off their food, just as easily as you notice her glancing over towards you at the counter whenever there’s a lull in their conversation.

By five, they’re less animated, the energy of their table fading faster than Roan’s usually does. Nyko might actually be asleep with his head pressed against the wall, and Anya stares at the pot of coffee they finally convinced you to just leave at the table, probably contemplating how much of it she would need to chug to keep her eyes open. She decides against it, pushing Woods in the shoulder and forcing her to stand, waving for the others to follow with the checks you left them earlier in hand.

Anya pays first, followed by Ryder half dragging Nyko and covering his end of the bill when an attempt at fishing through his pockets for his wallet comes up empty. You swear Nyko winks as he leans against his friend’s shoulder, watching him count out the extra cash through heavy lidded eyes. They hang around the door while they wait for the last member of their group, Woods twisting her patrol cap in her hands as you count out her change.

“Thank you. For getting me caught up on the game. And putting up with my reactions to it.”

“Don’t worry. It was a lot more entertaining than drawing that bag.”

“Glad I could be of service then,” She fumbles with her change before shoving it in one of her pockets. Unfolding her patrol cap and placing it back on her head, she lingers by the register another second longer. “And for the record, I thought it was a nice looking bag.”

Speechless, you watch them make their way into the parking lot, still masked by darkness. They’re long gone, cars invisible as they climb inside, only the faint sounds of revving engines carrying into the small lobby of the diner as they pull away.

Niylah hip checks you, reminding you there’s still a table to clear and a few last minute things to take care of before your replacement comes in, mostly packing up your study space to make room for the actual paying customers slowly starting to trickle in.

As you wipe down the table of the last apple pie crumbs and coffee rings, the napkin tucked under the salt and pepper shakers grabs your attention. It’s the group’s usual place for leaving tips, that part’s no surprise. The name scrawled across it is though, the thin letters bleeding out with jagged edges as the ink sinks into the grooves of the flimsy napkins, a trail of numbers lined up below.

_Lexa Woods_

_573-307-1213_


	2. Present, Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, glad to know there's plenty of you all still sticking around. Thanks for all the support so far!
> 
> Chapters are gonna start alternating between past and present now, so heads up.
> 
> commandermari.tumblr.com

With three hours left on your shift and the stack of papers in front of you waiting to be graded not shrinking, you spare another glance at the watch on your wrist. You swear the hands are ticking backwards, five minutes at a time, that this diner holds the universe’s secret to time travelling in one of the coffee makers behind the counter. You kick yourself for agreeing to stay late, knowing Niylah could handle the next few hours alone like she always has. You could have been walking out the door right now, with Roan waiting nearby to make sure you get into your car safely, driving home and letting yourself drop down into your bed and pretend the world doesn’t exist for a few hours.

Instead, you’re here, foolishly thinking that getting a head start on your grading for winter break would be a great way to kill the time. Essay after essay with half-assed attempts at copy and pasting straight off of Wikipedia pages leaves you cursing the state of Missouri for requiring all teachers to assign at least one writing based assignment per grading period, even the fine arts teachers. A job’s a job, and you love what you do, but you can’t fight the growing resentment you hold for the English teachers clearly not doing their job in teaching your kids how to do a proper biography.

You all but give up, knowing there’s no real reason to get ahead anyways. Winter break’s no special occasion, not when it’s just you at home this year. There’s no hanging lights outside of the trailer to keep you busy for two whole days, or driving out to Doe Run to cut down a Christmas tree to bring back home and start decorating. This year, there might not even be one of those crappy artificial trees like the one you set up in the lobby of the diner, no sense in putting up a tree when the only gifts underneath it would be ones bought and wrapped for you from you.

“Essays? Jesus, Clarke, I thought all these years I was paying you to go teach kids to draw glorified stick figures, not write papers.”

Niylah hangs over your shoulder, filling the chipped coffee mug in front of you, the faded Grinch face barely visible on the side after years of use. She plucks one of the graded essays from your pile, brows furrowing as she flips through the pages that you’ve bled over with the second red pen you’ve drained of life.

If you wanted to teach art history, you would have, but when opportunities for a freshly certified teacher with an art concentration are few and far between, you take what you can get. And in your case, that’s six classes of different levels of art at a local high school with a few hand written papers scattered in between.

“What happened to the water color self-portrait thing you were going on about during Thanksgiving? I was hoping you’d bring them, give me a good laugh.”

“Don’t make fun of my kids,” You swat her arm as she drops the paper back in the stack. Their reactions had been much like yours when you got assigned that stupid paper bag project your sophomore year, overwhelming amounts of eye rolling and complaining about your “no pictures or mirrors for reference” restriction. Three weeks over break was more than enough time for them to churn out some work, pieces Niylah wouldn’t see if all she was going to do was mock them. “They’re supposed to be working on them now.”

You know there’s more than a few that will put it off until the last minute, at least two immediately coming to mind that will probably hand theirs in on still sopping wet paper. But you’ll still hang them with pride on the walls until they get their next big assignment in, just like you have all semester.

For some of them, you know it might be the only time they see their work on display. For others, you hope it might be the little nudge they need to keep them from pushing their passion to the side. Those are the ones you leave the door to your room open for, during lunch and after classes let out, always reminding them they have a space to work without question if they need it. The last thing you want is to hear one of your seniors say they passed up on doing an art major because they’re supposed to do something practical, like engineering or pre-med, all because no one encouraged them to go after what they loved. You got lucky; others might not be so fortunate to be able to pull off a sudden change of heart like you.

But for the last two weeks of break, there’s none of that, no cleaning dried paint from desks or digging through supplies the teacher before you left behind in hopes of finding a few salvageable sets of oil pastels for your students’ next project. Just you, and Niylah and Roan, and the nearly empty diner until sunrise five nights a week.

All the years you spent here, tucked behind the counter or in one of the empty booths finishing up papers and sketches paid off, finally trading in your apron and order pad for mostly ironed shirts and a campus security mandated ID badge with a surprisingly decent picture of you printed above your name. Some days you miss it, the days when your alarm was set for six in the evening and not six in the morning, the old country station Roan sings along to on kitchen radio instead of the overly-peppy announcements about student council meetings read by one of the cheerleaders in your beginning art class. Even getting stiffed on a tip when you hustled to keep up with a table’s ridiculous demands seem like the good old days, those much less frustrating than when you’ve got a pissed off parent screaming at you during your prep period wondering how their kid got a zero for turning in a blank sheet of paper and calling it abstract art.

You miss your regulars, the list only growing the longer you worked there, three years worth of people coming and going, even in the late hours of the night. The egg and coffee ordering cabbie is long gone, the hangover nursing band that played Friday nights at the bar a few blocks away broke up somewhere between your junior year and the year you spent after graduation looking for a job, the old married couple that comes in every Sunday at sunrise still going strong. Your favorites remain gone though, their booth sitting empty, broken blinds still hanging in the window like a subtle tribute to them in their absence.

Niylah notices you staring across the room, eyes fixed on the seats that should be emptying around this time, the four uniformed guests making their way to the register to pay and head out for the night. She pushes your mug closer to you, throwing her arm around your shoulder and pulling you into her side.

“No news is better than bad news, right?”

She’s seen you like this before, knowing there’s not much else she can say or do to make things better. No amount of her gut rotting coffee can ease your worry, the obscene amount of sugar you have to dump into it to make it drinkable probably not doing much to settle your nerves. It’s torture, waiting on phone calls that might never come, a feeling you‘ve grown to know all too well in the years you’ve spent wearing grooves into the floor behind the counter with all your pacing.

Your heart jumps into your throat when a phone actually rings, the hammering in your chest only dulling when you realize it’s the diner’s phone hanging in the kitchen ringing and not the one in your pocket. You still check for good measure, your screen coming up blank while Roan’s gruff sleep filled voice mumbles a greeting into the phone, a few affirmations trailing out of him before he’s calling Niylah over. She hesitates, giving you another squeeze, one that gets cut off by Roan banging the phone on the pick up window.

“Can you not be a pain in my ass for one day?”

“Let me go home and sleep and I’ll consider it.”

Even you know he’s not going anywhere, not until Echo comes in to replace him in a few more hours. Niylah takes the phone, lingering around the counter trying to ignore Roan’s groaning as a trickle of cars spills into the parking lot, a rare early morning rush preparing to break out. One look out the window and she knows the three of you are in for it, two more cars filing into the lot as the first group of six makes their way to the door.

“Just hurry up and get here before I change my mind.”

Niylah hangs up and tosses the phone back to Roan, gathering menus and meeting the first party at the entrance to the dining room. For all of your sakes, you hope it was Ontari or one of the other servers on the other line, offering to come in early and spare you all the agony of running yourselves ragged this early in the morning.

 

By the time your third table gets sat, any hopes of finishing grading or lamenting another holiday season alone leave your mind, a break you’d be more than grateful for if it didn’t come at the hand of dealing with the four assholes in the corner booth wanting nearly everything on their orders substituted. Roan’s barely hanging on as you clip another order on the window, the look on his face screaming his contemplation of locking himself in the dumpster outside.

“What the hell does over easy mean?”

“How have you been working here longer than me and don’t know what over easy eggs are?”

“I work nights, nobody ever orders anything more complicated than toast. And if they do, they’re probably too drunk to notice their eggs always come out scrambled anyways.”

“I swear to God, Roan, if you being a thick headed idiot costs me a tip…”

You prepare yourself for a round of harassment from the table when they get their orders thanks to him. No wonder you always pass up on the free meal you’re allowed each shift, not trusting his abilities as a cook or feeling like dying of food poisoning from undercooked bacon or chipping a tooth on a burnt piece of toast. Niylah cuts off your impending threat involving a spatula and a quick dip in the deep fryer, standing between you and the window.

“Both of you, shut up. Clarke, take this to table five, then get the customer at the counter I just sat,” She shoves a pot of coffee in your hands before leaning through the window to face Roan. “You, pull your head out of your ass and start cracking eggs. Echo just pulled up, she’ll be in here before you can screw them up.”

You leave before the kitchen turns into a bloodbath, Echo already heading towards the kitchen as promised. Topping off the travel mugs for the pair of nurses waiting to head out to the nearby hospital, you catch Niylah leaving the kitchen to deal with a table of construction workers trying to put in to go orders for lunch on top of their breakfasts, an order slip that’ll be sure to send Roan and Echo into a screaming match over who bites the bullet and starts prepping them.

With the counter already packed full, the figure at the end of the line gets cut off as you make your way towards them. No less than three people stop you for coffee refills on the ten foot walk towards the newest customer, leaving them waiting far longer than they ever should have, even on a Saturday morning.

“I’m really sorry about that wait,” You duck below the counter to fish out a fresh mug and a set of silverware for the newest person, sliding it in front of them without a second look as you spin around to grab another pot of coffee, the one Niylah handed you just minutes before already down to the last drops clinging to the side. “I’m Clarke. Can I get you anything to start off with?”

“I think I’m gonna pass on that coffee for now. My tolerance for it is kind of shot.”

Her voice nearly makes you drop the pot in your hands, locking you in place with your back still turned towards her. If this is someone’s idea of a joke, doing a dead on impression of her while you’re out here worrying yourself to sleep every night, they might not make it out of this diner alive. While your heart screams for you to turn around and look, you can’t move, frozen in place until you hear footsteps by your side and feel a hand wrapping around yours.

Three taps against the back of your hand, that unspoken sign reserved only for you, brings you back to the ground.

It takes half a second of looking up and realizing it’s not a prank, that it’s really her, before you’re throwing your arms around her neck and nuzzling into the crook of her neck. You breathe in, the warm scent of sandalwood and amber perfume settling deep into her jacket and her skin despite being away for months. Lexa smells like home, like the pillow you’ve curled up to every night since she left, spraying it with the nearly empty bottle on her bedside every time it starts to fade.

Faint cheers echo in the diner, claps coming from the guests at the counter realizing they’re feet away from a long awaited homecoming, even the booths in the far corners eventually joining in. Echo and Roan throw wolf whistles through the pick up window, and you swear you hear Niylah scolding them and calling them a couple of egg burning perverts. The quiet beats of Lexa’s heart drown it all out, a steady rhythm you can’t get your own to sync up to to save your life.

“I missed you, Clarke.”

You lift your head from her neck, balling your fists in her jacket. Tears leave a glistening spot along the side of her neck, ones still burning in your eyes as you pull her in for a kiss six months overdue. You hold your breath, expecting any second now to wake up and have it all be a dream, to find yourself in an empty bed without her, Lexa still overseas going on week five of no contact. She brushes her nose against yours before pulling away, her own eyes brimming with tears. Lexa’s here, and she’s safe, and she’s real, with her arms around your waist, anchoring you together.

 

“How long do I have you for?”

Niylah lets you slip out of the dinner, apologizing for making you think you’d have to stay those extra hours. Lexa had her in on the plan all along, convincing Niylah to keep you at the diner for a few more hours until her flight came in and she could surprise you. She’s practically a saint for helping Lexa pull this off, and you wonder just how indebted you are to your friend for always letting you and Lexa’s relationship cause disruptions in the diner.

“Two weeks. I tried to get out here the same week your semester ended, but they poked ass getting my request approved. You’ll have me home for good after I go back for another six months.”

“Can we not talk about you going back?”

It’s not your favorite topic in the world, one you’ve already had to discuss with her too many times for you to ever be happy. Her nine month deployments had been bad enough, not earning her any amount of time to come back home in the middle of it. These two weeks off might be the only benefit of her twelve month deployment, even if it means a second goodbye and six more months of spotty contact. Emails every few weeks if you’re lucky, ten minute phone calls that might stretch out to fifteen if there’s no one else behind her in line. You both know you can’t avoid it for long, but Lexa nods and starts rummaging through the glove compartment, pulling out receipts and reading them over.

“We can talk about how often you’ve been driving my car while I’ve been gone.”

“How else do you expect me to keep up with your precious maintenance schedule if I don’t drive it to the dealership?”

If there’s anything in the world Lexa cares about even remotely close to you, it might be her beloved Camaro, the first thing she bought herself after finishing up all her training and getting stationed at Fort Leonard Wood. She made you swear more than a few times to keep up with her regular oil changes and paint protection treatments while she was deployed, the receipts in the glove compartment showing you more than held up to that vow.

“Did you also get three parking tickets at the dealership?” Lexa flips through the tickets you would have hidden in your own car if you know she was coming home, the most recent one dated just three days ago. Her eyes widen as she comes to the last ticket in the stack. “And doing thirty over the speed limit? Clarke, what the hell, do you think this is a damn racecar or something?”

“Well, someone has to drive this thing like it’s meant to be driven.”

At the next stoplight, you rev the engine for good measure, eyeing the driver in the SUV next to you. Lexa drops her head back, sighing as you take off at a normal speed, even though you know you could have beaten the guy to the next light by a huge margin.

“Excuse me for being the responsible driver.”

“I’ve seen old people drive faster than you. Sure you don’t just want a station wagon?”

Lexa finds your sunglasses in the cup holder, propping them on her face and giving you a knowing look behind the lenses. Any cover story you had about not using her car that much is blown, Lexa knowing damn well those glasses never leave your car, and that the cobwebs forming under your tires back home will give you away even more. You can already hear the lecture about being in parking lots with skittish sixteen year olds carrying freshly printed licenses in their pockets, one that’ll be followed by her meticulously checking every inch of the Camaro for new dents and dings.

“I take it back. I’m going to Disneyland for the next two weeks. You’re not invited.”

“Fine by me, I’ll take this baby down to the drag strip, see what she can really do.”

“Don’t joke about Heda that way, Clarke.”

 

When you pull up in front of the trailer, gravel crunching under the wheels as you park underneath your kitchen window, Lexa hesitates. She fumbles for her bag in the backseat, taking the long way around the back of the car to stand by you and take your hand in hers. These homecomings are never easy for her, no matter how badly she wants them. You know she does, more than anything when she’s been away for a few months, but something always leaves her struck still for a few minutes, like she’s expecting her home to be gone each time she comes back.

You wait with her, hiding the shivers wracking your body as you wait in just the thin sweatshirt you threw on before rushing out the door for work last night, squeezing her hand every few seconds to remind her that it’s all still real. The bird feeder still hangs on the corner of the porch, empty after the last birds headed south towards the beginning of November. Her little red charcoal grill still sits tucked in the corner under a black tarp. Even the wooden swing she hung from the branches of the tree covering your tiny patch of a front yard shill stands, the rope frayed in a couple of places after a few heavy rains and nasty freezes wearing it down.

After a few minutes, when you both realize this is still your home no matter how often you two aren’t together in it, she leads you through the chain link fence, gripping your hand tighter when she nearly slips on a patch of ice covering the stone path up to the porch. Steadier in combat boots than you are in a pair of sneakers, you let her guide you up the steps, taking the key from your hand and popping it in the door.

Her hand freezes on the door knob, jiggling it a few times. The last time she’d done that, it came off in her hands, nearly giving her a panic attack hours before she had to be back on base for her pre-deployment run through.

“Nyko came by and fixed it,” You know Lexa had something to do with that when her friend showed up unannounced, asking where Lexa kept a toolbox so he could take care of it before it led to you getting locked out of the trailer or robbed. “And he took a look at my car a few times. Fixed the leaky faucet in the bathroom. Switched on the heater. And he kind of got around to-“

Lexa’s raised eyebrow cuts you off, probably not expecting a laundry list of things that went wrong at home in her absence. As many things as there were, you’d been fully equipped to deal with them all, even if it meant calling in Nyko for reinforcements for most of them.

“I dealt with it just fine. See? Trailer’s still standing.”

“It’s probably just up in flames inside.”

Opening the door, she pauses, as if waiting for a chunk of the ceiling to come crashing down in front of her. A few incident free seconds pass before she steps inside, you following and shutting the door behind you. Lexa opens the closet door in the entryway before giving you a chaste kiss.

Leaning against the front door, you watch her in her routine, one that started before you moved in together, before you two even met, back when she still lived on base in shared quarters with the other first lieutenants fresh out of training. She never lets herself take more than four steps into the place she calls home wearing her full uniform, insisting she draws a line somewhere between work and her personal life. She shrugs out of her jacket, hanging it on one of the heavy duty coat hangers at the top of the closet, patrol cap tucked inside one of the pockets. Her bag lands with a thud on the floor, kicked to the side to make room for her boots. Left in only her form fitting tan t-shirt and her trousers, she pulls the dog tags from around her neck, hanging them on the hook by the door between your keys.

They swing back and forth, wearing grooves into the paint behind them, flecks of white chipping away to reveal the dark wood beneath it. You paint and repaint that same patch at least once every few months when Lexa’s home, all of it wearing away soon after. You let it slide, knowing the second you hear the little surface scrapes that Lexa’s back where she belongs, that she’s done having to be Captain Woods until the next time she slides them back over her head.

You’re not one to waste time in moments like this. Any other day, you’d have Lexa pinned against the closet door, ridding her of her shirt before it even clicks shut behind you, the last of her clothes a breadcrumb trail marking your path from the door to your bedroom, with a few detours on the couch and against the utility closet in the hall. But after a week of your body fighting your new nocturnal schedule, the high of realizing she’s back home wearing down, you’re still leaning against the door, almost too tired to move.

Lexa picks up on it, simultaneously tugging her hair from its tight bun and pulling you further into the trailer, leading you by the hand towards the bedroom. You bury your face in her hair, nuzzling into her back between her shoulder blades as you take slow, dragging steps down the hall. You’re proud enough that you manage to get her shirt untucked and her belt undone, feeling her chest shake as she giggles and swats your hands away. She wraps your arms around her waist as you near the bedroom door, letting out a content sigh when you drop a kiss to the infinity sign tattooed on the nape of her neck.

“You’re tired,” You try to hide the yawn as she pushes you to sit at the foot of your bed, heading towards the dresser on the other end of the room to fish out a change of clothes. “You can sleep. I’m not going anywhere.”

Catching the sweatshirt and shorts she throws at you, you rid yourself of the black tee and jeans you’d worn for work. As you slide the new shirt over your head, one you barely notice is one of Lexa’s well-worn Blackhawks hoodies, you witness her own shirt falling to the floor, black sports bra following it, leaving her clad in nothing but a pair of black boxer briefs. Without even glancing back towards you, she manages to draw you to your feet again.

“I can sleep later.”

Your head falls back between her shoulder blades, lips pressing against each notch in her spine until you reach her hairline. Closing your eyes, you let one hand trace up her back, following the lines and circles of the tattoo along her spine, an image you know by heart, one you can see even with your face buried in her hair again. Her skin is soft under calloused fingers, marred only by thin scars stretching along the right side of her body, littering the span of her back from her shoulder to her hip, a few reaching around towards her ribs.

You can still see them, red and angry and screaming, stitched shut and healing all too slowly under bandages you had to help her change. Her first deployment after moving in together had been a nightmare, and IED blast cutting it short and sending her home wounded. You knew what you signed up for with her, that there was a chance something like that could happen, but you never imagined it happening so soon. The scars healed, pink and white lines still inching across her tanned skin, but the thought of them still sends your stomach reeling.

“I’m fine. I promise.”

She feels your other hand crawling across the plane of her stomach, resting just under her rib cage. You wonder if the right side of her body is cursed, forever destined to bear every scar she earns. The shrapnel wounds, the little dimples on her shoulder from skidding into a patch of gravel after a nasty childhood bike fall, a heavy scar on the back of her calf from a car accident when she was still in high school. Your thumb circles the one above her stomach, a single bullet nearly costing her her life just weeks before you met. You’re not sure why, but it haunts you the most, even if you never had to live though seeing her suffer from it, the skin already healed by the time you came into each other’s lives.

“I know. I just want to make sure.”

You’d take having to suck it up and deal with Lexa being gone for a few more months and coming home safe than having some accident send her home early, when every day without hearing from her makes you question how much danger she’s actually in.

Another brush of your hands over her torso, the last pass more teasing than actual checking for injuries, you ease away from her, crawling back up the length of your bed. Fighting the urge to close your eyes fails as the bed dips next to you.

 

You wake what feels like hours later, though the time on the TV shows it’s only been thirty minutes. Guilt weighs on your chest, for wasting the already dwindling time you have with Lexa. If there’s a way to survive two weeks without sleep, you’ll be the one to find it, anything to make the most of your time with her before she leaves again.

But Lexa’s still next to you, the blanket previously crumbled at the foot of the bed draped over the two of you. Her breath comes soft and even against your neck, flyaway hairs tickling your cheek with the slightest shift of her body. Icy fingers creep underneath your shirt, tracing along the dips between your ribs, across your stomach, and back again, goosebumps popping up in the wake of her path, even with the heavy blanket covering you.

Rolling to the side, you find Lexa awake, all small smiles and cold hands and looking at you like you’re the one person that keeps the universe moving in perfect sync.

“Were you watching me sleep?”

Lexa nods, hand falling on the small of your back and tugging you both closer together. Your hands find the hem of her sweatshirt, the Bears logo cracked and chipped from hundreds of washes over all the times it’s passed hands, from Jake to you, from you to her. If home has a smell, it’s woven in the fibers of that sweater: yours and Lexa’s shampoos, whatever laundry detergent was cheapest the last time you went grocery shopping, and if you bury your nose far enough in it, Jake’s old cologne and his Sunday morning blueberry pancakes.

 “I was trying to be romantic,” Rolling your eyes, you push at her shoulder. She catches your hand, pulling you even closer together until your noses are brushing, pressing your heads together.  “What? Am I not allowed to look adoringly at my wife after not seeing her for six months?”

Lexa fidgets with the rings on your finger, twisting your engagement ring until the small diamond sits centered, the plain silver wedding band sitting flush against it. You search for her free hand, tucked underneath her head below her pillow, linking your fingers together until you feel the cool metal against your skin. Lexa opts against a full set of rings like yours, settling on a solid silver band with your initials engraved on the inside.

“Getting soft on me there, Griffin?”

“That’s Griffin-Woods to you.”

 “Excuse me, Mrs. Griffin-Woods,” The addition to your name still feels foreign, whether forming on your own tongue or falling on your ears, even after all this time, an endless battle between you and Lexa teasing each other with your full names. “Your name looks good on the board in your classroom.”

Lexa sees enough of your room to know it like the back of her hand, the emails you exchange almost always attached with pictures of the growing collection of projects hanging on the wall or you up to your elbows in paint stained paper towels trying to salvage the desk tops before the vice principal sits in on your classes the next day. All plans of dragging her on campus the week before classes started to get the room set up went flying out the window, Lexa deploying two months earlier, just weeks after you found out you got the job. But her words of encouragement still came the morning of your first day, leaving you grinning as you wrote your name cross the dry erase board in blue and green marker, a proud picture sent Lexa’s way seconds before the bell rang.

Half a world away, Lexa reminds you that you made the right choice, that going after that degree was worth it, that you’re doing the one thing that would truly make you happy. Even when mandatory meetings drag you out of bed two hours earlier than usual, or the student council advisor refuses to quit riding your ass about signing up to be next year’s incoming freshman class’ faculty sponsor, you know you can’t picture yourself doing anything else.

“I wish I was there. I missed you,” Lexa mumbles the words against your lips, scooting closer until your hips sit flush and your legs tangle together. “I love you.”

Here, next to you, in your own bed, in the home you’ve built together, she still reminds you it’s the right choice.

“I love you, too.”

 

“Clarke, baby, your phone’s been ringing for like, ten minutes straight.”

Lexa’s nudging you awake, her hand slipping out from under your shirt as she props herself up in bed. Whoever’s dumb enough to call you right now has no idea what’s in store for them, the hours after your shift some of the only you have to get any sleep, whether your wife is home or not. She hands you the phone that wound up sandwiched between the two of you while you slept, stretching as she tries to wake herself up.

Your admiration of her, still half asleep, yawning with eyes clenched shut and the hem of her shirt riding up, gets cut short when you catch the name across the screen. You’re not sure why it’s still saved in your contacts, years passing since you’ve even considered calling it. You’re not sure why you even have your DC number still. Laziness, you remind yourself, knowing that taking up Lexa’s countless offers to add a line to her account means going through a million and one different accounts to update your phone number, hours better spent on literally anything else in the world.

It comes back to bite you in the ass as Abby’s name disappears, a voicemail notification popping up in its place. Of all the days she has to call, after nearly three months without contact, she picks today, Lexa’s homecoming.

You hand the phone to your wife, a familiar drill the two of you have perfected. Any time Abby calls, Lexa listens to the message, sparing you the guilt trip laden messages as she wishes you a happy birthday or hopes you’ll be coming home for the summer. It’s probably not healthy, that the closest thing to contact that your wife has with her mother-in-law is deleting her messages for your sake, but it’s how you’ve managed all this time, and you’re not about to start questioning its effectiveness now.

Lexa’s thumb hovers over the screen, murmurs of your mother’s voice barely audible in the silence of your bedroom. Instead of tapping the button, ending the call, and picking up where the two of you left off, Lexa hands the phone back, hand trembling as she waits for you to accept it.

“You need to listen to this one.”

The message loops when you bring it to your ear, Lexa standing and rummaging through the bedroom closet. You watch her pull one of her old duffle bags down and drop it to the floor, emptying drawers into it while you pick up the pieces of Abby’s message.

_“-why nothing else I’ve said has been enough to make you come home, or at least tell someone where you are. But Clarke, I know you’re still getting these messages. I need you to come home._ We _need you to come home. Your dad…he’s not doing good, sweetheart. It might be time. I can’t lose you too. Just please, come back home. We love you, Clarke.”_

The phone drops from your hand, bouncing on the bed as the message plays again. The quiet thump against the blankets draws Lexa’s attention away from packing, bringing her to kneel in front of you at the edge of the bed.

“Clarke. Hey, will you look at me?” Eyes blurring with tears, you pick your head up, Lexa’s hands settling on your cheeks. All bliss from your reunion fades from her eyes, green depths brimming with worry. “We can get out there by tonight. Everything will work out.”

You manage a nod, though she doesn’t let go of you.

“We’ll get through this, okay?”

Waves of guilt crash over you again, sleeping in feeling like such a petty thing to stress over, not when she’s packing and ready to throw her entire leave out the window for the sake of getting you back out to DC. You’re still processing Abby’s words when Lexa’s walking out of the room, her laptop and credit card in hand when she returns.

He’s not doing good and it might be time, the words all too vague for you to even attempt to comprehend. A sharp decline out of nowhere like this leaves you petrified. What if the flight Lexa’s in the middle of booking doesn’t get there soon enough? What if you get there and it’s a false alarm? What if Abby’s lying and Jake’s fine sitting at home watching TV, simply becoming so desperate for you to come home that she’ll say anything to get a rise out of you?

You give her more credit than that. As tarnished as your relationship may be, you know she’d never stoop to that level. If she would, it would have happened when you first left, when the accident was still fresh on everyone’s mind, when there was still a chance that the right string of words would have left you dropping everything and driving straight back to DC. Nearly four years later, it’s too late for those kind of tactics, leaving nothing but the truth.

 

You’re silent until you leave for your flight, Lexa dropping your bags by the door as your boarding passes print out in the kitchen. Your phone stays clenched in your hand, like you’re expecting the rest of the calls and messages to start flooding in and confirm your fears. Raven, Murphy, Wells, any of them telling you that you’re too late, that your mother can’t even bear to break the news to you herself. But the world you left behind remains silent, and you keep holding your breath in fear.

Either Lexa’s spending her downtime on deployment honing her mind reading skills or the tension you’re carrying as you lean against the fridge is clogging up the entire room, something tipping her off and pulling her across the room towards you. You settle against her chest as her arms encase you, her hand rubbing circles into your back sending you into another fit of silent tears.

“I’m not going anywhere, Clarke. I’m staying right here with you.”

Her promise weighs heavy in your chest. It’s not the way you imagined her meeting your family, your friends, if you can even call them that anymore after going off the grid and leaving them in the dark for years. You never really imagined her meeting them at all, your life here with her something they would never touch, never even know exists. Now she’s throwing herself into the lions’ den, sitting back at home and letting you face this alone nowhere near an option.

Lexa kisses the top of your head, and in the quiet of the room, you hear the shudder in her breath.

“You and me, Clarke. Don’t worry.”


	3. Past, Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm cranking this story out. The joys of waiting on employment after moving to a new state. East coast is ruining my sleeping schedule, y'all.
> 
> commandermari.tumblr.com

_“Clarke, please just answer for once.”_

You play the message over and over, hiding in the office of the diner, all but ignoring the two tables you have sat in favor of hearing your mother’s voice.

_“If you want it to be this way, fine. Maybe it’s my fault anyways. I know I haven’t been around since the accident, probably not how you need me. And maybe that’s why I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, or when you’re coming home. But it has me scared, Clarke. We’re all losing it over here worrying about you.”_

None of her words are anything new. You can count on one hand the number of times you sat face to face with Abby and talked after the accident, both of you distancing yourself from another, Abby spending more and more time in every wing of the hospital besides the one Jake was in, you sitting vigil at his bedside to avoid going home and seeing your mother there. You’re surprised she even noticed you were gone after the first day, expecting it to take her days of not seeing you curled up in the chair in Jake’s room to realize you had left.

_“You know how many times I’ve had to stop Raven from getting on a bus out to LA or New York because she insists you’re out there? The only reason there’s not a search party out for you is because John keeps insisting he’s heard from you, that you told him you were fine, but I don’t know if he’s telling the truth or just trying to make me feel better. But even he’s worried, Clarke, and you know how John is.”_

You do know, because their calls kept your phone ringing non-stop the day you left, a steady string of vibrations coming from it in the passenger seat as you drove from DC to Terra Haute before stopping for the night. The Travel Lodge you stopped at in the middle of the dead zone was a blessing, the lack of reception being the only thing silencing your phone as you tried, yet still failed, to sleep through the night. You broke the silence before you headed out the next morning, solely to tell Murphy you were safe, knowing he might be the only one to not pry for more details; he hadn’t, and his passing along the message seemed to buy you a few more hours of peace until you drove over the Missouri state line.

_“We just want you back, sweetheart. Here, where you’re safe and happy with us. I know things aren’t the best right now, but that’s why we all need each other, to make them better. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, it can’t be better than being with us, where you belong.”_

Things might be better in DC. In DC, there’s no rent to worry about, or student loans piling up on you, or spending the nights you’re away from the diner mostly alone. In DC, there’s the house you’ve lived in your entire life, still breathing with memories of Memorial Day cookouts that drew half the neighborhood into your backyard. There’s a cushy scholarship to Georgetown earned from four years of joining every possible extracurricular to pad up your application, as if the college fund Jake started for you when you were still a blur on an ultrasound wouldn’t have been enough. There’s nights rarely ever spent without the company of another person, Raven or Octavia hosting girls’ night in your room, Murphy and Bellamy taking you bar hopping as their wingwoman, family dinners that stretch long into the night.

On paper, it makes no sense, trading in safety and what looked like a stable future for nothing but uncertainty. You might not make enough in tips to cover rent and your car note this month. You might flunk out of the one class you need before getting your teaching certification. You might not make a single friend in this town besides Niylah and Roan, if you can even count him as a friend. But for the first time in years, you feel like you, like the Clarke Griffin you’ve kept hidden away for so long, letting her be buried under everyone else’s expectations of you. Out here, there’s no lap of luxury like the one you grew up in. But out here, there’s you, and you feel real, and you feel safe.

_“You have to come home, Clarke. If you won’t come back for me or your friends, then come back for your dad. He’s awake. He’s awake, but he’s not doing too well, not like we hoped. There’s good days and bad days, but every time he wakes up, he asks for you. You’re the first thing on his mind, and I don’t know how to tell him that I don’t know where you are.”_

Abby’s words still draw a stutter in your breath, no matter how many times you replay the message. He’s alive and awake and asking for you, and it’s nearly enough to make you drop everything and drive back home. Remorse leaves your heart sitting heavy in your chest, for not being there when he woke up and letting him feel your hand in his, for leaving him to wake up possibly alone after being in a coma for four months.

_“He might be coming home soon, once they get him stable and put him through some physical therapy. I want you there when that happens. We’re a family. We can’t do this without each other. Just please, come back home. We love you, Clarke.”_

You know she’s right, that you need each other, that you need everyone who’s ever stepped foot in the Griffin house to power through this and see him recover. You’d throw your life here away at a second’s notice to stay by his side for every step past the accident if he asked.

But you know your father, and you know he won’t ask, not if he knew why you left in the first place. And somewhere deep down you think he does, that the words you mumbled by his bedside sank into his subconscious, that he heard you saying you got accepted into Drury, that you only picked leaving for Missouri because it seemed like the one place obscure enough that you could truly feel like you were starting over. You told him of your future plans for your classroom, of the things you wanted to teach your students. You choked out the words _“I don’t want to be a doctor”_ for the first and only time in your life. Part of you thinks he heard them all. And part of you thinks he’ll still understand.

At least, you hope he will, that he’ll know you’re staying away from home for yourself, that it has nothing to do with the fact that he might not be Jake anymore. Physically, he’s still there, all broad shoulders and kind eyes, even after countless surgeries to fix the injuries from the accident. But mentally, you know there’s a chance that he might not be the same; you don’t need those years of pre-med classes drilling information into your head to know someone doesn’t just waltz out of a coma without some kind of lasting effects, ones that might take weeks or months to work through, if he ever does.

It terrifies you, losing the life you had back home, uprooting everything you were building for yourself here, just to lose Jake again too. There’s no restarting after something like that, and you’re not sure you would even have the heart to try again if you had to.

There’s a pull that won’t go away, one that keeps almost convincing you to go back. But if you go back, they might never let you leave. Abby might guilt you into staying, acting like the mother she should have been all this time. Raven might take your car apart piece by piece, leaving you reliant on one of them to get anywhere your feet can’t take you. Murphy might steal your money and your credit cards, stopping you from hopping the next bus or flight out of town. Jake might take one look at you and ask you how you’ve been, keeping you by his side telling stories about your adventures in waiting tables and getting lost on campus, stories you’ll stretch out and spill every useless detail about for as long as he'll keep listening.

It’s the least enticing choice you might ever have to make: choose between being happy with your friends and your family or being happy with yourself. There’s no middle ground to stand on, like any attempts at compromising with both will leave you stumbling. Go home, and you risk losing yourself, just when you finally started to feel happy with who you are and what you’re doing. Stay here, and you risk losing them, goodbyes going unsaid, reunions never to be held.

You lean your head against the desk, wishing there was some kind of way that it would work. Maybe going back home and skipping the whole college thing for a while, waiting tables in a restaurant out there while still keeping up with your friends and taking afternoons off to accompany Jake to therapy. Sighing, you accept the truth, that a plan like that would last an entire week before Abby’s back on your case about going back to Georgetown.

“Hey, Clarke?”

The office door swings open and you hang up your phone, Abby’s message playing for the tenth time since you first got it. Niylah peeks in the office, catching you lifting your head from the desk, all swollen eyes and red cheeks, sniffing as you wipe the tear tracks streaking down your face.

“You okay?”

She hovers in the door frame, as if she knows you’re thinking of up and bolting out of the diner and back to your car, driving halfway across the country in the middle of the night for the second time in less than half a year. You try to throw on a convincing look, nodding as you stand to make your way back outside. Your final presentation for communications has been sitting abandoned on the counter for a good thirty minutes now, a mind numbing enough project to be just the thing you need to keep your thoughts from racing.

Niylah stops you, hand wrapping around your arm and pulling you back into the office.

“Look, I don’t know what it is that’s got you running back here every time you refill someone’s coffee, but whatever it is, it’s got you messed up. Go home, take the night off to deal with things.”

The apartment’s the last place you want to be right now. You just managed to make it start to feel like home, picking up a few paintings from a thrift shop to hang in the living room, a few done by your own hands hanging in the bedroom after a long drought of not being able to paint or draw anything that wasn’t for a grade. Going back tonight, it might be the loneliest place on earth, worse than it was even on the first night you moved in, when you were still a stranger in your own world.

“No way, I’ll be fine. Besides, I have rent coming up, I need the hours.”

“Jesus, like the drunks are gonna leave you $200 in tips tonight?” She has a point, traffic through the diner even slower and less sober than usual. “I’ll pay you for the hours you were scheduled, but I don’t need you breaking down crying into my coffee. Get some sleep, talk to whoever you need to about this, get drunk, get laid, whatever you need to do. Just come back tomorrow with your head on straight, yeah?”

Fighting Niylah is useless, knowing she could just as easily take you off the night shift and throw you back in the mornings or afternoons, when you’re actually forced to deal with people and can’t take the time to get your assignments done. Not wanting to push your luck, you nod and slide past her, making your way to the counter where your things have been gathering dust.

You pass the cabbie, already on his second plate of Roan’s gourmet toast for the night, not expecting to find Lexa sitting there again, phone propped against her coffee mug, right next to where all your notes and textbooks splay across the counter. Behind her, Anya, Ryder, and Nyko sit at the usual table. Anya’s half sprawled into Ryder’s lap, hand tangled in the cord of the blinds again, tugging every which way insisting she can get them open.

Your mind switches off the issues back home, remembering the phone number on the napkin tucked in your glove compartment. You slow before you reach Lexa, the soldier still too engrossed in what’s likely another hockey game to notice you. It’s not that you intended to blow her off, to let the number go unused, but between final papers and group projects and practically living in one of the study rooms on campus, you’ve barely found the time to breathe, let along hold a conversation with anyone.

All chances of ducking down and crawling past her, stealing your things off the counter one by one while Lexa’s too distracted by her game to look away, disappear as Niylah trails behind you, taking the plates Roan slides across the pick up window and heading towards the soldiers’ table. She nudges you in the back, mouthing “get out of here”, and sending you stumbling forward, just enough for Lexa to look up and catch you glaring back at her retreating figure.

“Hey.”

Lexa tugs one of her earbuds out as she speaks.

“Hey.”

For good measure, you give her a half smile, drawing a confused look out of her as you scoop things into your bag, Niylah circling back around and dropping her order in front of her, right where your communications textbook sat seconds before.

“I thought you always took care of these guys on Saturdays?”

Lexa nods towards the booth, leaving you wondering just how she knows that. Maybe Anya mentioned in when she suggested coming to the dinner the week before, their place as regulars with a strict routine already established. Maybe Ryder had to break the news to her that the waitress that rejected her would be there every week taking their orders. Whatever the reason, it leaves her looking disappointed.

“I do, but I’m heading out for the night. Boss’ orders.”

“That’s a shame. You might miss Anya going full drill sergeant on those blinds.”

Both of you turn, Anya ignoring the plate of pancakes in front of her in favor of one more attempt at forcing the blinds up. Ryder and Nyko shake their heads, like they’re highly considering taking up a permanent residence at the next table over. You won’t be surprised if you come in tomorrow night and find a couple of the slats broken, or the blinds ripped from the window completely.

You go back to packing, loose leaf pages of your notes winding up crushed under your books. Lexa doesn’t go back to her phone though, twisting the free earbud around her finger and poking at her food. You pull the keys from your pocket, ready to take the first step out from behind the counter, when Lexa pops the other earbud out and looks towards you.

“Clarke, wait,” You pause in front of her, her fidgeting with the cord in her hands worse than that of Anya’s behind her. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable last week, if I was too forward or anything.”

“For leaving your number?”

Lexa nods, leaving you slightly amused. Her number scrawled on a napkin might be the least offensive thing a patron of the dinner has ever done to you. Just half an hour before she and her friends came in, the drunk guys three tables down from them tried ordering a side of sweet ass with your number. More than a handful of skeezy married guys have slipped their business cards and a few crumpled dollar bills in your hand as they follow their wives and kids out of the diner. But to Lexa, your silence meant some kind of discomfort, a boundary that didn’t even exist somehow being crossed.

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“No, I do. Obviously it wasn’t welcome, considering we barely know each other. And I really don’t want to make things awkward since we’re kind of here a lot.”

“It actually was welcome,” Lexa fumbles the earbuds, tilting her head to the side like she hadn’t heard you right. “But I’ve been drowning in stuff getting ready for finals, so I’m absolute trash at communicating with people right now.”

“You don’t have to make excuses, Clarke. I can handle it.”

“No excuses. Here,” You hold out your hand, gesturing to her phone. Lexa hands it over, watching as you close out the video on the screen, another hockey recap, just as you called it. You program your name and number into a new contact before handing it back to her, trying not to laugh at the look of surprise crossing her face when she realizes what you did. “Now you can remind me to pull my head out of a bunch of French Renaissance paintings every once in a while and talk about something else like a normal person.”

“Does this mean you’re giving me free reign to discuss the greatness that is Johnathan Toews and Patrick Kane in this last game with you?”

“On second thought, I might not answer.”

Lexa laughs, quiet and shaking her head as she drops the phone back on the counter. Her nerves visibly disappear, Lexa finally acknowledging the food in front of her. You linger for a few seconds, relishing the fact that you’ve managed to make it a whole ten minutes without reaching for your phone to hear the message again or burst out crying in the office. Lost in your celebration of having some control of your emotions, you miss Lexa speaking to you again, finding her staring at you waiting for an answer.

“Sorry, what?”

“I asked if you wanted to join me for a while, seeing as you’re no longer working.”

“It’s fine, I don’t want to keep you from your friends.”

You’re not likely to be the best company anyways, never knowing when you might break again. Some memory of Jake and Murphy waking you up at three in the morning to go fishing with them might send you spiraling, or another phone call might come in and start the whole cycle over again. But Lexa nods towards the seat next to her, and maybe this might be the distraction that you need. Sitting down, she offers you one of the earbuds, moving her phone so it’s angled between the two of you.

“Would you be offended if I throw the game back on?”

“Wow, already sidelining me for hockey? And here I felt flattered for a whole two seconds.”

“It’s playoffs, Clarke. Hawks are down by two games, our season could be over tonight.”

As much as you want to tease her, you can’t, the same words falling out of your mouth when you shot down Octavia’s offer to go to dinner with her new boyfriend a few years back, too dedicated to watching the NFC championship game with Jake to dare leaving the house.

“No wonder they kick you off the table.”

“It’s only for a few months. Besides, they missed the majority of it while I was deployed.”

“So that’s why I never saw you with them before.”

Lexa nods as the video picks up again from the start. She doesn’t bother skipping ahead, and you know she’d already been at least halfway through when you took it from her hands to add your number. Instead, she inches her plate towards you, offering up some of her food. You shake your head, not wanting to intrude any further, instead watching the red and white figures darting across the ice.

“You weren’t here when I left,” Lexa watches you instead of the game, blushing when you quirk your eyebrow at her comment. “I’d come with them every now and then until I shipped out in December, but it was usually just Niylah working.”

“I barely moved out here in January. Didn’t start working here until a month ago.”

“And you’re out here for school, right?” You nod, ignoring the sounds of a screaming crowd and the slap of a stick on ice filling you ear. “You come from Chicago too, or just your dad?”

“No, just him,” You wonder if maybe you should have headed out there when you left. Imagine the look of surprise on his face if you came home, telling him stories of running through his old stomping grounds, bringing home a couple souvenirs to cheer up the drab white walls of his hospital room. “I lived in DC my whole life.”

Lexa groans, one of the red jersey clad figures sinking a shot in the back of the net, horns blowing in the background over the voices of the commentators. She looks half ready to rip her hair out, even though the clock is still ticking down, the game nowhere near being over. The video buffers, leaving her enough time to regain her composure, one she finds back in her conversation with you.

“Can I ask what made you leave?”

It’s not that she’d be the first, though no one else has asked for permission before. Niylah used it as a chance to make small talk when she trained you in your first days on the job, pointing out that you didn’t exactly have the small town look about you; you made up some excuse about school and a change of scenery, a half-truth that seemed like a good enough answer to her. Others, like Roan or the little study group you have at school, probably don’t even know your last name, let alone that you’re the polar opposite of the usual type of people they meet in this town.

“Okay.”

“What made you leave?”

Even knowing the question was coming, it still hits you, almost as hard as seeing Abby’s name pop up on your phone earlier that evening had. The thought of leaving leads to the possibility of returning, both enough to nearly send you unravelling again. You inhale, the shaky breath echoing in your chest, loud enough you expect Lexa to hear it over the newly resumed thuds of bodies hitting the side of the hockey rink and fans screaming for a comeback.

Maybe she does, because she taps the screen and pauses the video, cutting off all sound. Lexa doesn’t speak, instead looking down at your hand lying flat along the counter. She taps the back of it three times, gentle enough to tear your attention away from the cracked plastic surface and back towards her.

“It’s okay if you don’t feel like answering.”

She waits, unspeaking, keeping her eyes focused on you, making that much harder to keep your composure. Lexa looks at you like you could spill every detail of your life onto the countertop and she’d sit in silence helping you sort through the mess, piecing things back together. It might be what you need, instead of keeping it locked up inside. There’s no one else you could turn to, not here at least, and you still expect any calls you make at home to go ignored. The only person there you can still trust might not even be able to answer.

You make a mental note to call up the hospital in the morning, after you’ve had time to sleep on things, to see if you can convince one of the nurses to get Jake on the phone.

“No, it’s not that. It’s just fresh wounds, you know?” Lexa nods, not realizing by fresh wounds you mean ones that you spent four months stitching shut only to have them ripped open hours before she walked in. “Things just went all sorts of wrong at home. I just needed time to breathe.”

“Most people don’t go to college in another state when they need to breathe.”

“Guess I wanted to suffocate somewhere else.”

“Are things any better?”

You think back to that night, Abby’s repeated phone calls stirring you from sleep. In hysterics, she stammered out something about an eighteen wheeler and a red light and Jake coming home from work. You remember dropping the phone somewhere between your bed and the hall closet, banging on Murphy’s door to wake him up. You all but dragged him out of the house, still wearing Spongebob pajama pants and one arm sticking out of his shirt, forcing him into the car to drive to the hospital.

And you explain it to Lexa. She listens with little interruptions, only asking for clarification on the finer details, like who Raven is and why she wound up nearly getting escorted out by hospital security for trying to hack a vending machine. You tell her about the late nights, waking up curled in a waiting room chair, Murphy or Octavia by your side, Abby sometimes shaking you awake to let you know your dad was out of another surgery. Lexa gives you her full attention, even as the story drags on, circling back to the phone call from hours before.

“My dad’s out of the coma, but he’s not doing too well.”

“I’m sorry.”

They’re the same words you heard nearly every day for months, from your friends, from the nurses at the hospital, from every person you ran into who recognized you as Jake’s daughter. From Lexa, still a stranger to the entire situation, they feel more honest. Maybe it’s because you’ve gone months without hearing them again, finally allowing them to have meaning behind them.

“Thank you.”

Lexa sips from her coffee, and you’re more thankful that she doesn’t press the issue than you are for her condolences. No prying, no asking for more details; she lets you be, lets you say the words out loud so they unwrap themselves from around your throat. Spilling your guts to her might be cathartic, letting out months of tension. But for now, you’re comfortable with this, and it seems like she is too.

“Can we get back to that game?”

Lexa grins and passes the earbuds back your way, not hesitating to pull the video back up on her phone. You lean closer towards her to see the screen, but within a few minutes you’re back to watching her. Chicago scores, and from the combined cheers of the two of you, you almost forget everything that happened that night before you sat down.

 

With the game highlights long over, Lexa’s phone tucked safely back in one of her pockets, she makes no effort to move.

“So, you guys honestly did not think there would be consequences to setting off fireworks in your house and setting a pillow on fire?”

“In our defense, my parents weren’t supposed to be home. And I thought our neighbors were so used to me and Murphy trying to kill each other over the years that they wouldn’t think anything of it.”

“I’m pretty sure your previous attempts at murder didn’t nearly take the entire house down with you.”

“You’d be surprised. Me and Murphy can be very creative.”

Lexa shakes her head, as if she’s wondering just as much as you how your conversation ended up here. It might have something to do with you detailing your great escape from home after Christmas, scaling the side of your house with a backpack over your shoulder and your suitcases chucked down into the snow covered lawn before. She doesn’t believe the story, leading you to recount the time you climbed up the house carrying three lit Roman candles, Wells shaking next to you as you pathed up to Murphy’s window, Raven on the ground with a few perfectly angled bottle rockets.

“You’re making me appreciate the age gap between me and my brother even more. His little baby hands couldn’t do too much damage to me before I went off to college.”

“You guys are really that far apart?”

“Yeah, take a look,” She pulls out her phone again, pulling up a picture that must date back years. Her hair hangs over one shoulder, not pulled up in a tight bun like you’re used to seeing, almost as shocking as when you realize she’s not wearing a uniform, just a loose t-shirt and cut off shorts. A smaller boy slings his arms around her neck, a shaggy mop of sandy blonde hair pressing against her cheek. “That’s Aden, my little buddy. We’re sixteen years apart.”

“He’s adorable.”

“Yeah, he is. But also slightly evil. I’m convinced he somehow knew when I had projects or exams coming up, those were the only nights he would stay up crying.”

“Maybe he wanted you to flunk out of school and become a full time baby sitter.”

“I think my parents would have been okay with that idea. Not the flunking out part, but the staying home thing.”

“They’re not happy that you went in the military?”

It’s Lexa’s turn to fall silent, facing what just might be her impossible question. You give her the same patience she gave you, letting her form her thoughts while she toys with the spoon in her coffee mug.

“My step-father’s mostly okay with it, just proud that I’m out here doing something that makes me happy. But my mother’s never been thrilled with the decision.”

“How come?”

The shrug of her shoulders is all too familiar, like she’s been carrying the same weight as you when it comes to the people she loves approving of her choices. Unlike you though, she’s faced it head on, not just running away from the conflict it created.

“She lost her first husband, my actual dad. He was a Marine. He died on deployment before I was born.”

“Lexa, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize. My step-father, he’s been there my whole life, literally since the day I was born. I got lucky.”

Her loss left her with a second chance, one you can’t help but be envious of. It’s petty, but your mind keeps going back to it, how if Jake’s condition doesn’t improve, you won’t get a second chance like Lexa did. You’ll be left with nothing but memories and an ache that might never fade away. Luck doesn’t even begin to cover it.

“You said you went to college though,” You trace back the steps of your conversation, anything to get away from the topic of losing fathers and mothers not supporting decisions. “Don’t most people do that the other way around?”

“Usually they do. I went to school in Oklahoma for three years, did an ROTC program that covered nearly everything, then left for officer training after graduation. They stationed me here ever since.”

“You willingly left Chicago for Oklahoma? And you’re giving me a hard time for coming to Missouri?”

“Same as you, Clarke. I needed a place to breathe.”

All you can offer is a nod of understanding before Nyko comes to Lexa’s side. He towers over the both of you, placing a hand on her shoulder.

“So, you got lucky with Toews in overtime. Congratulations.”

“Excuse me, Clarke,” Lexa spins on her seat to glare at him for interrupting your conversation. On the other hand, you almost want to thank him, breaking things up before you started digging too deep into each other’s pasts. “Did you come over here to gloat that the Blues clenched their playoff bracket?”

“No, I figured you were a little too preoccupied to worry about that,” You can’t help but notice Nyko’s little glance towards you. “But thank you for reminding me. I actually came over here to say goodbye.”

Behind him, Ryder and Anya stand from the booth, making their way towards Niylah waiting at the register. Anya watches you and Lexa while Ryder pays, shaking her head and tilting up on her toes to whisper something in Ryder’ ear. The man shushes her, pushing her in front of the register.

Neither of you realized how long you’d been sitting there at the counter, nowhere near as long as the group had stayed for Lexa’s homecoming, already back to their usual in and out trips. Anya and Ryder make their way back through the dining room, Lexa clasping Nyko’s arm as the two exchange a few hockey related insults that you will probably never understand.

“You heading out with us? Nyko’s staying at our place if you want to join the party.”

Lexa looks back towards you after exchanging the same arm clasp with Nyko. You’re more than willing to let her leave, having stolen all of her time from her friends with your emotional baggage, though it leaves you feeling lighter, like maybe you can actually head back to your apartment and sleep through the night. She shakes her head, standing to pull Anya into a hug.

“Leave the door unlocked for me, I still haven’t found my keys.”

“Don’t come in too late.”

Anya leaves with a wink, Ryder shaking his head as the three leave the diner, throwing caps back on their heads as they walk across the parking lot. Lexa turns back in her seat, propping her head in her hand, inviting you to continue the story Nyko cut off.

“You don’t have to stay here. I kept you distracted from everything long enough.”

“It’s a nice distraction,” You share the sentiment, even if Lexa’s been doing more listening than actual distracting you from the matter at hand. “The guys are always in our house anyways, I’m sure they’ll still be there whenever I get back.”

“Still, you said you just got home. I’m sure you didn’t catch up on everything in a week.”

“We didn’t. But I’m not leaving again for a while, I have plenty of time.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind? That they don’t mind?”

“I’m positive.”

The two of you fall back into silence, even when Niylah comes to take Lexa’s plate, giving you a look questioning why you’re still there and why she’s paying for you to still be there.

“Do you think you’ll go back and visit your dad?”

Lexa’s attempt to break the silence only drags it out, leaving you scrambling to try to pull together an answer. You haven’t explained that much yet, that you’ve been wracking your brain for hours trying to answer that question for yourself. Sensing your struggle, she taps your hand again, three more times before wrapping her own around it completely.

You sit like that for a while, neither of you speaking, Lexa giving your hand a light squeeze each time you shift in your seat, another round of tears fighting to spill from your eyes. The light touches keep you grounded, reminding you that nobody is forcing you to head back tonight, that nobody is forcing you to go back at all.

Sunlight starts slipping through the windows on the opposite wall, bouncing off the metal of the pick up window. Nearing the time you should have been leaving for your shift, you decide it’s best to head home. As you stand, Lexa follows, having stayed at the diner far longer than she probably intended.

“You know, having you keep me up to speed on the game wasn’t all that bad.”

“I’m sorry if I get a little too enthusiastic,” Enthusiastic, she calls it. You call it having her get lost mid-sentence trying to explain the concept of an empty net because she’s too busy urging whoever has the puck to shoot the damn thing already. “I’ll have to treat you to watching a full game, not just a few minutes of highlights.”

Pausing at the counter with her wallet out, Niylah shoos Lexa away, and by extension, you. You’re convinced she isn’t comping that meal and letting you both walk away, that by the time you’re back later for your next shift, she’ll have a full blown interrogation planned out. Lexa holds the door open for you and an older couple making their way inside for the early bird specials.

“I’m not sure if I can handle all this.”

Lexa slows as you walk along the side of the building, your car parked off to the side. As you turn around, realizing she’s no longer by your side, she tenses up.

“I understand. Most people don’t like to get involved with this sort of thing.”

She flops the patrol cap in her hands and tugs at the collar of her jacket. Despite your earlier conversation, you nearly forgot about her job entirely, focusing more on Lexa than the uniform she’s wearing, like it’s a completely different side of her that disappears when you get to talking. That side sends her out to the nearby base for works, and it’s responsible for her coming and going on deployments for months at a time.

She expects rejection because of it, and your heart pangs at the thought of all the times before this that led her to that assumption, especially knowing it’s a sore topic with her family.

“I’m not talking about this,” You step closer to her, settling your finger on the patch in the middle of her chest. A single gold bar sits stitched on it, one you know represents her rank, but you haven’t figured out what it exactly is yet. “I’m talking about sitting next to you watching you flip out for hours over a game like you’re the next player up on the bench.”

Your words take her by surprise, but she comes to her senses, moving your hand from her chest and lacing your fingers together. You steer her back towards your car, swinging your linked hands between you.

“So, if you’re saying it’s not an issue,” She hesitates, as if you’re about to tell her it is the military thing, not just her borderline obsession with the sport. You stop at the side of the car, leaning against the driver’s side door, nodding for her to continue. “Would you be willing to join me Monday night to watch the next game?”

Mondays usually mean a night off after a weekend at the diner, of trying to get back on a mostly normal sleeping schedule for the next couple of days, your classes still existing too early in the morning for your liking. With finals creeping up, it means more studying and frantically trying to finish essays and presentations and searching for your will to even keep going to college. Throw in the shock of the phone call and the news that Jake’s awake, and you might just be a ticking time bomb.

But Monday gives you time to heal. You’ll figure out what to do about the situation back home. You’ll talk to Jake yourself, explain to him again and again why you’re not there, and get his say in the matter. You’ll make that decision together, whether it draws you back home for the summer, for good, or maybe keeps you rooted here.

For now, Lexa brings you comfort, the mere hours in the diner with her covering you with a feeling of warmth you haven’t felt since you left home. You mind feels clear, and your heart sits a little less heavy in your chest, and it’s mostly thanks to her.

“I’d love to, Lexa.”

“Can I further interest you with dinner at my house beforehand?”

“Absolutely.”

You linger in the parking lot, wondering if it’s even healthy to have your emotions do a complete 180 like this. Guilt weighs on your shoulders until you think of Jake, how in a few hours he’ll be relieved to hear your voice again and know you’re okay. You moved out here to survive, to find a way to cope with having your world fall to pieces around you. But after four months, maybe it’s time to stop coping, and maybe with Jake’s blessing, you’ll find a way to start living.


	4. Present, Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This update brought to you by my inability to play GTA V, thanks to an 8GB update and terrible internet.
> 
> commandermari.tumblr.com

Each mile ticking by on the dash of the rental car sends your heart leaping into your chest, so unbearable you have to beg Lexa to pull over again, even if you just stopped less than fifteen minutes ago. She idles in the parking lot of the gas station, the last one sitting a few miles outside of the neighborhood boasting your former home.

So close, you can almost see the roundabout leading up to your street, the one with the fountain you and Octavia nearly got caught dropping bath bombs in. So close, you can almost feel the goosebumps rising on your skin, the temperature dropping as you head downstairs from the kitchen to the den in the basement. So close, you can almost hear your dad laughing again, echoing from the master suite on the third floor all the way to the garage in the back of the yard.

“This sucks.”

It’s the first time you’ve said something that wasn’t a direct answer to a question asked by someone at the airport. All of Lexa’s directions this far from the airport came from you typing the address of your old house into your phone, letting the GPS guide her instead. Quiet fills the car for so long, Lexa jumps at your voice, nearly sending her packet of powdered donuts from the gas station flying into the backseat.

“I didn’t want to spend our time this way.”

Everything you had planned, all the ideas you started coming up with since leaving the diner, slips away. There’s no time for last minute Christmas shopping, the usual place in your closet reserved for hiding Lexa’s presents throughout the year sitting empty, not expecting her to be back until the next summer. No watching Lexa hang Christmas lights on the edge of the trailer through the kitchen window, worrying yourself half to death when she stretches too far to the side on the ladder. You can’t even bite your tongue and buy a fake Christmas tree for the corner of the living room to decorate, knowing all the tree lots are likely sold out by now.

Even worse, you’re dragging Lexa away from it all. Not just the hastily thrown together holiday, but the quiet moments of being back home. After months overseas, she deserves nothing less than waking up whenever she feels like it, sprawling across your bed, even if it leaves you with half a foot of space. Mornings that don’t actually start until noon, afternoons spent on mundane chores, nights meant for catching up on old TV shows, nearly all somehow ending up entwined around each other on the nearest flat surface; you both crave it, a sense of normalcy lost over the last few months, but it has to be pushed to the side for now.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You had to come back, they’re your family.”

“You’re my family.”

Your family with her goes beyond the rings on your fingers and the marriage certificate locked in the safe with the rest of your important documents. It’s the unexpected extension of family she brings you, from her parents and brother to Anya, Ryder, and Nyko as pseudo siblings. It’s the string of bad luck in your attempts at keeping a handful of goldfish alive that leaves you reconsidering the idea of getting a puppy for a few more months. It’s believing that one day you’ll have a real house, when Lexa’s not constantly in talks of being stationed somewhere else, somewhere you might only stay for a few months before being packing up and moving across the country again.

“I know,” Lexa reaches for your hand over the seat. Your knuckles brush against each other before she threads her fingers between yours. “That’s why I’m here with you.”

 

Another five minutes pass before you give Lexa the okay to keep driving. If you had it your way, you would never leave that parking lot, not unless you were turning right back around to head to the airport. You’re not sure when that’s happening though; Lexa only booked one way flights, proving she’s prepared to spend two full weeks down in DC with you.

Lexa parks across the street, under the overgrown tree of the vacant house up for sale. You remember the Cartwigs living there, Callie being a close friend of your mother’s, the two organizing outings more for the two of them to sit back and talk than for you and Murphy to get out with her two sons. Looking further down the street, none of the neighborhood looks the same, like everyone packed up and left at the same time four years ago.

Your old parking space in front of the house, just edging the legal distance away from the fire hydrant outside, lies empty. For all you know, the relatively well kept Hyundai you drove since high school might be in the garage out back, or sitting in a used car lot waiting to be haggled over by some pushy salesperson. Abby’s car is gone too, usually parked right behind yours. Not seeing it there eases your mind, nowhere near enough to send you sprinting to the front door though.

“This is where you grew up?”

You nod, almost able to see the chalk drawings that littered your sidewalk every weekend under the snow. The tree that dumped piles of leaves taller than you every fall still sits in the front yard, branches scraping the top floor of the house. Outside, everything’s the same as you left it, watching it grow smaller and smaller in your rearview mirror. The key in your hand burns your skin, like it knows it doesn’t belong here anymore.

“We can wait a little longer if you want.”

Going to the house first seems like the best option. The hospital feels too soon, too final, too much like you’re walking in there willing to accept that your mother’s words might be true, that it might be too late. The house gives you a shot at comfort, a few fleeting moments of hope before you make the drive to the hospital.

Without answering, you pop open the door, Lexa following suit. You circle the car and take her hand, taking a few unsteady breaths before crossing the street and following the path up to the house.

You thought the walk away from the house had been the hardest, carrying nearly everything you owned in bags dragging behind you, thinking you may never set foot in this house again. Walking back up to the front door is even worse, the weight of your entire world on your shoulders, unbearable compared to a few suitcases stashed with clothes.

Holding your breath, you slide the key into the lock. It clicks right in.

Taking the first step inside, Lexa follows you, shutting the door behind you both. Inside, it’s pitch dark, every light on the lower level turned off. You half expect someone to peek their head out from the kitchen or from the stairs, questioning who the unexpected intruder is. That’s all you feel like here, an intruder, breaking and entering with the convenience of a key into a place you don’t belong.

But in some way, you still do. Flipping on the nearest light, you cross through the foyer, pictures of you still lining the walls. Your last family portrait hangs next to the door to the dining room, one taken at a reunion a year before you left, your little patch of family flanked by endless aunts and uncles and cousins you’ve never met before in your life.

“I don’t think anyone’s here.”

You cross into the living room, clicking the lights on one by one. Lexa follows, looking around the room, one neither of you ever expected to be in again in your life.

The mantle of the fireplace holds smaller frames, older, more candid shots of your family nestled inside them: you learning how to ride a bike, Murphy with the first fish Jake helped him catch, Thanksgiving with the Jaha family at their home a few blocks away. You find yourself in the pictures, nobody replacing them with ones purposely leaving you out or taking a pair of scissors and slicing you out of the memories.

Lexa lingers near some of the ones on the bookshelf embedded in the wall, taking a frame off the shelf and holding it in her hands. Crossing the room, you get a clear view of the picture she’s looking at, the dusty frame sitting in front of some of the older albums, ones mostly holding photos of the early years of your parents’ marriage.

It’s you, no more than a few weeks old, swaddled in a blanket and tucked against Jake’s chest. You can’t help but smile as Lexa wipes the dirt from the glass, allowing both of you to see he’s wearing none other than the infamous travelling Bears sweatshirt, and you in a matching onesie. You wonder if anyone will notice if the photo goes missing, frame and all ending up stashed in between the pairs of socks and shirts in your bag, more deserving of a place in your living room or on your bedside.

“So, the baby pictures do exist.”

Rolling your eyes, you peek out into the hall, nobody coming from the other rooms or from upstairs. If they were home, they’d have heard you by now and come down. You ease a little, knowing if anyone’s coming back for the night, you’ll catch them coming to the door with enough time to prepare your defense for being there. Heading back in the living room, you drop onto the couch, turning to watch Lexa trail along the edges of the room.

“Lexa, if you start making fun of them, I swear, I will send you back home myself.”

“Did anyone ever point out how bald you were as an infant?”

You’ve seen the pictures of Lexa growing up, her parents bombarding you with them practically the second you stepped in their house for the first time. Her constant groaning and begging for them to stop only fueled your requests for her mother to dig out more piles of photos, the whole ordeal having to span across two nights until you came to the photos from her last visit. The closest she’s come to seeing your past is the old pictures saved on your phone, the few that made it through the mass deletion spree you went through after being away from home for a month.

There’s the shoe box under your bed that’s only been touched once, filled with the pictures you took down from the walls and frames in your room before leaving. Lexa looked through them with you, flipping through the pictures of the huge dinner for your sixteenth birthday, the last summer spent with your grandparents down in Florida, the road trip to California on your first college spring break. She’s seen your favorite, one taken in the parking lot after your graduation: you, Murphy, and Wells all sporting caps and gowns, Raven, Octavia, and Bellamy mingling between you, Jake and Abby at either end of the line, like two proud parents with their whole swarm of kids.

In those pictures, you’re happy, the single moments of pure joy radiating off you and everyone around you. And in the ones you’ve taken since leaving, you’re just as happy, though it feels like two entirely different lifetimes separate the pictures. You could stick them side by side, one of you and Raven sitting on towels at the beach, another of you and Lexa minutes after getting married, and nobody would see a difference. But to you, it feels like you’re looking at an entirely different person.

“You know, Anya’s been trying to convince me you were grown in a lab or something.”

Lexa picks up a picture from the shelf below, one you recognize right away. Hair pulled back into pigtails, scowling like you’d just received the worst news of your eight year old life, Murphy next to you with an almost identical frown: your parents had just told you they planned a trip to Disneyworld, both of you disappointed that the other was included in it. You’re not sure how any of you survived that trip. Jake and Abby thought it would be a good way for the two of you to bond as a new family, never expecting it would take years for that to even be up for consideration, let alone actually happen.

“That’s ridiculous. I’m sure there’s an actual video of my birth here somewhere,” You pause, Lexa looking up from the picture with a raised eyebrow, as if you’re inviting her to scour the cabinets under the TV. ”Don’t get any ideas.”

“Trust me, Clarke, that might be the last thing I want to see,” Lexa sets the picture down, crossing the room to the display on the fireplace. “But you have to admit, it is a little weird that I’ve never seen a picture of you taken before the age of sixteen until now.”

“It’s not that weird. Most people don’t bring their baby pictures with them when they move. Or keep them in an envelope in their bedside table.”

“How many times must I tell you they were for a project in a gender studies class?” Lexa sits next to you, slinging her arm along the back of the couch. “What was I supposed to do with them after? Throw them away? Send them back to my mom?”

“I’m still offended you hid them from me until she brought them up.”

“I wasn’t hiding them from you, I simply neglected to tell you they were there.”

“Because you wanted to deprive me of seeing baby Lexa dressed up like a Dalmatian for Halloween?” She groans and lets her head fall back, ignoring the smirk on your face. “I knew it. I’m asking your mom for am 8x10 of that one.”

Lexa snaps back up, eyes wide and shaking her head in fear. You laugh, and it’s the first time that sound’s echoed through the room and down the hall in this house in a long time. If anyone’s home, they’d have to notice it, drawing them straight to the source. But the house stays silent, as quiet as it was the day you left.

“Don’t bother,” Lexa shakes her head, worrying that you might actually call up her mother and ask. “She won’t do it.”

“I’m her favorite daughter-in-law, of course she will.”

“You’re her only daughter-in-law.”

“Doesn’t make it any less true.”

While Lexa leans back, probably contemplating how she can convince her dad or brother to destroy all evidence of that picture before her mother gets her hands on it, you cross back to the bookshelves she’d scanned through earlier. Pulling one of the books at random, you bring it back to the couch, balancing it between your laps as you wrap yourself under her arm.

 While you tuck your legs underneath you, Lexa turns through the pages in complete wonder. Her hand, once rubbing up and down your arm, slows and stills, until you can practically feel her melting next to you.

“I can’t believe I’m looking at baby Clarke.”

She flips another page, the same picture of you and Jake in the frame plastered on the page, next to one of you asleep on Abby’s chest. The two of you tear through the book, Lexa pausing to make little comments reminding you just how bald you were or how she’s not surprised that you’re sleeping in a majority of the photos.

“Look how cute you used to be.”

Your three year old self is staring back at you, tugging a bucket of chalk around the front yard, bright purple bandages on both of your knees. Jake’s shadow hangs next to you, taking the picture from farther out in the yard. Just like him, always supporting your art, even when it was no more than scribbles on concrete.

“Used to be?”

Lexa kisses the side of your head, threading your fingers together.

“Mhmm,” Another press of her lips to your temple follows. “And you still are.”

The moment leaves an ache in your chest, growing stronger as Lexa wordlessly passes through the next few pages, smiling to herself when one of the photos caches her eye. Jake should be here, going off on long winded stories about each of the pictures, remembering every little detail about them. Abby should be at his side, chiding him for thinking polka dot shorts and a striped t-shirt were a good idea the one time she let the two of you pick out an outfit for school without her approval. Murphy should be in the corner chair, rolling his eyes until Jake reminds him that his own baby pictures are just one album over.

With Lexa’s family, it felt right, like they fully accepted you the second she started grumbling and hiding her face in her hands. With just the two of you here, no Jake egging Lexa on for the sake of watching you bury your face in the crook of her neck, trying to hide the blush on your cheeks, it feels empty, no matter how much of a kick your wife is getting out of it.

Lexa turns back to the beginning of the book, the picture of you and Jake on display.

“I like this one.”

So do you, letting her know with a squeeze of her hand. Her admission cements your decision to make it out of the house with that picture. There’s a place for it somewhere, hanging on one of the walls in the living room next to one of her own baby pictures. There’s also a face it needs to rubbed in, for however long Anya’s been trying to convince people you’re part of some baby farm operating in a secret government facility.

“We can do the same thing with ours,” Lexa bumps your foreheads together, her breath tickling your cheek. “Little Blackhawks jerseys and all.”

You don’t have the conversation often, both of you painfully aware than any expansions to your family beyond pets are still far down the road. Lexa’s still got four years left on her contract, one she intends on resigning the second she gets the chance; you’re not thrilled, the plan guaranteeing your more years of being uprooted from the place you call home, more months without seeing from her, more endless waiting for a chance to just be you with each other. You’re still a fresh faced teacher, not even a full year under your belt, nowhere near ready enough to step away from your classroom.

But when you do talk about it, in little comments whenever you see an undeniably cute baby, or full blown interrogations when you’re visiting Lexa’s family and her dad and brother form an unrelenting tag team requesting grandkids and a small army of nieces and nephews, you’re reminded just how badly you crave it. In the quiet nights after particularly long days, it’s a reminder of why you both put up with the stress of it all, knowing it’s all building up towards the day you have that dream house with the dog and the kids chasing it around the front yard.

“You can’t turn our kids into hockey fans when they’re infants.”

“Yes, I can.”

“I will take them and leave. One screaming hockey fan is enough in my house.”

“It’s going to be in their blood, Clarke. Those jerseys are their birthright.”

You hold a few choice words about Bears uniforms being the true birthright back; if you start that conversation now, Lexa will never stop it.

“That’s assuming they come out of you.”

“Who says they aren’t?”

You scoff at that one, a pregnant Lexa the last thing you’d ever expect to see. She’s miserable when she gets so much as a cold or her allergies start kicking in; coming home from work and curling into a little ball so sad and helpless, you want to make a commercial and slap a Sarah McLachlan song and a 1-800 number on it, guilting people to believe that for just sixty cents a day they can rescue a suffering soldier from a bad case of the sniffles. No way she’d ever survive carrying a growing human for nine months, even if it was your child.

“I know you, Lexa.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Yeah, like walking in on my sister and a complete stranger talking about which one of them is getting knocked up.”

Lexa freezes at the new voice, one that nearly sends you jumping straight through the ceiling to the second floor. Turning away from Lexa, you find Murphy leaning against the door frame, watching the two of you in the midst of yet another family planning fantasy. You’re not sure whether you want to hug him or strangle him, and going by that classic Murphy look of disdain, he probably hasn’t made up his mind either.

“Where the hell did you come from?”

“Well, seeing as you clearly don’t have a grasp on the basics of biology,” Murphy points between you and Lexa. “When a man and a woman tolerate each other very much-“

“I was pre-med, asshole.”

“Yeah, key word ‘was.’ You could be Putin’s personal assistant for all any of us know.”

The only tension breaking sound in the room comes from Lexa’s little “pfft,” one that sends her into the negatives on Murphy’s tolerance scale. Because that’d be the most likely option, that you stumbled across a Craigslist posting for an immediate opening as the right-hand woman of the president of Russia. A career choice you’re sure your wife, a newly promoted Captain who shudders at the mere mention of the country, would be more than thrilled to support you in.

You look at Murphy, dumbstruck that he would even make the joke, only earning that flat faced gaze right back at you. “ _For all any of us know,”_ you repeat in your head, because until two minutes ago, nobody in this house or in this city had any idea that you even existed in the same universe as them anymore, that your phone that still played your voicemail greeting and still opened their texts and screened their phone calls wasn’t just some discreet portal linking together two different dimensions that you could have flicked between as much as your heart never desired.

“I was downstairs. I heard voices and thought Mom was back or something.”

“She’s not here?”

You look around Murphy, towards the basement door still hanging wide open from his arrival, where you half expect Abby to pop out from at any second. He shakes his head, but you’re still on edge, like they’ve been plotting a coup for years that relies on your arrival, Abby lurking somewhere in the shadows waiting for the second you let your guard down. Only a mother’s love can do that.

“Back to her usual routine,” Murphy flicks on the hall light, slinking into the kitchen without so much as a wave for you to follow. Taking Lexa by the arm, you follow behind. “Goes in for a meeting with some donor about the pediatric wing, calls up saying she’s staying on call for a couple of hours. Couple of hours turns into sixteen, and she doesn’t come home for half a week.”

The three of you had mostly moved into the hospital the first time around, sleeping in the waiting room or on the couch in Abby’s office, only stopping home to shower and get a change of clothes. Those weeks saw your friends living in the house more than you, Bellamy staying to make sure the house was safe at night, Raven holing up in the spare bedroom on the rare nights you did come home and stay for longer than twenty minutes at a time. After a few weeks, Abby started disappearing, leaving money in yours or Murphy’s accounts to buy groceries, avoiding you as she made rounds in the hospital that collided with the hall Jake was residing in.

“Even before she found out about Dad?”

Murphy stops in the middle of the kitchen, pulling one of the barstools out from the island. You keep your hands tucked at your sides, too scared to touch anything, worse than you used to be when you first started at the diner, believing Roan would toss a chef’s knife across the room for so much as putting a slice of bread in the toaster.

“Look, do you really want to do this right now?”

You give Murphy a look, because you’ve spent a four hour flight running over every question anyone back here could ask you, so why wouldn’t you just bite the bullet and start with the one person you’ve even remotely spoken to since leaving? Knowing Murphy, he’ll either sit back and ask you two “yes or no” questions, be satisfied, and go back to lounging in his room like he never saw you, or he’ll keep you up until sunrise wanting every detail of every minute of every day since you’ve been gone.

“Because if you want me to sit back here and ask what the fuck was so important that you couldn’t talk to anyone for four years, I gladly will,” His voice cuts sharp, and you realize even if you two spent most of your lives together at each other’s necks, pushing the thin line between sibling rivalry and straight manslaughter, your leaving hurt him more than he will ever let show. “Or I can go easy on you, get you a plate of food, and let you feel like you have at least one person in your corner through the guaranteed shit show that you showing up will cause.”

You soak in the silence. There’s not a single person in your family or your old circle of friends that won’t know you’re hear. And once the rumor flies, there won’t be a single day where you can avoid them or their questions or whatever choice words they want to throw your way, ones that have been stewing in the pits of their stomachs every time someone mentions you or sees a picture of you or another phone call goes unanswered. They’ll turn into a mob, an army that not even Lexa alone can help you hold back. You know you’ll have to let Murphy have his turn too, but for now, you’ll take his rare offer of grace. You nod, and Murphy wraps around to the cabinets, taking out three plates.

“You’re not too good for some meatloaf, are you?”

No such thing will ever happen, even if you still hold some resentment towards Murphy for being able to recreate Great-Grandma Griffin’s recipe even better than you or Jake ever could. A day long contest between the three of you for bragging rights, Abby, Raven, and Wells serving as less than impartial judges. Breadcrumbs and eggs caked the counters for weeks, your burning hatred for Murphy and his victory drawn out far longer, but the scar on Jake’s palm from a losing battle with a can opener outlasts anything else from that day.

“What about you?” Murphy points a spatula at Lexa. “Because if you plan on eating, I need some kind of introduction, be it from you or my manner lacking sister.”

You’ve been through this before: with new staff at the diner that question you when Lexa and the rest of her table would come in each weekend and earn a little bit better service than anyone else walking in the door. From classmates that spent a few minutes talking with the both of you after Lexa swings by campus to give you a ride home. Even with the parents that come by your classroom for conferences that do little more than comment on one of the pictures taped to your desk. Every time, you throw the phrase “my wife, Lexa” out like it’s more natural to say than your own name. But you fall short, looking between Lexa and Murphy, both waiting for you to say anything.

The seconds that pass feel like hours, only being saved from drawing out into an eternity when Lexa reaches across the island, extending her hand out to Murphy.

“Lexa.”

You hold your breath. No last names. She’s throwing the ball in your court, letting you drop the news when you’re ready, letting your brother find out about that part of your life, the biggest part of your life, from you at your own terms.

“Murphy. Not John, regardless of what she might have-“

“Lexa’s my wife!”

Your own terms come within seconds, much to the surprise of everyone in the room. Lexa holds her breath, white knuckling the edge of the counter, ready to bolt out of the house if it even looks like Murphy’s going to react badly. As for dear old brother, he lets the slice of meatloaf hanging off the spatula drop to one of the plates.

“Well, most people bring flowers or a bottle of wine back home with them,” Wine might come in handy when you inevitably have to deal with Abby and tell her the same thing, along with the mile long list of the other slightly significant life details you should probably tell her. Murphy shrugs it off though. “Might have appreciated a bottle of scotch myself. I’m guessing nobody else knows?”

You shake your head. The two of you didn’t exactly send out invitations, drawing family and friends in from across the country for the event. You didn’t rush to get out phone calls or texts announcing your engagement. Nobody even so much as knew Lexa was a part of your life, let alone that you vowed yourselves to each other.

It’s not that you’re ashamed. If there’s anything you’re more proud of than the steps you’ve made in your own life, from your degree to your career, it’s Lexa. But you know your family and friends, and you know that they’ll nitpick the little details of your relationship, calling into question all the things they disagree with. Especially Abby, yours and Lexa’s relationship a goldmine of opportunities to try to make you feel like you utterly drove your life into the ground by leaving.

Murphy slides the plates across the counter, piled high with meatloaf and leftover mashed potatoes. Lexa gives it a questionable look, like she’s seen better food on some of her deployments. It’s part of the family tradition and a key to the success of the recipe, a plate a day old and cold still just as good as when it came out of the oven.

“I’m sure the goon squad will have a field day when they find out.”

You nod, though the mention of your friends leaves your stomach churning. They’ll come around eventually, whether someone lets it slip that you’re back home, or one of them sees you for themselves. For a second, you consider leaving, knowing that Murphy will keep quiet, never mentioning seeing you or Lexa at the house, as quiet as he was the day you told him you left for good.

“You’ll probably see some of them at the hospital. Guessing you didn’t got here yet either?”

“Our flight barely got in. We planned on going first thing tomorrow morning.”

“You planning on staying here for the night?”

You look to Lexa as Murphy brings his own plate over. You talked her out of booking a hotel while waiting for your flight to depart back home, believing your mother wouldn’t take no for an answer if she offered to let you stay. Part of you wants to be here, back in the house you grew up in, hoping you can still find the little traces of Jake in it that existed before you left.

“Think Mom will care?”

“She might. Especially after she finds out about this,” Murphy slides into the seat across from you, pointing between you and Lexa with a fork. You wouldn’t be surprised if Abby’s still enforcing the “No boys or girls upstairs after ten” rule, even though you’re a grown woman who hasn’t lived at home in years. “And, you know, the four years you went missing.”

You didn’t go missing. You made a life for yourself, one that nobody back here would ever picture working out. You went from being a terrible waitress at the diner to a halfway decent assistant manager by the time you graduated. You only had to sit around for a year waiting for a school to give you a shot at teaching, a record considering some of your fellow graduates were still clinging to the same part time jobs they held before finishing up their degrees. You started making a difference, knowing there’s a handful of your students who light up the second they walk into your classroom and see you sitting there, something you know would have never happened by now if you kept forcing yourself through med school, turning you into the most miserable doctor any patient could ever have.

You made a family there. One from the diner, with Niylah and even Roan, the older siblings you never had and sometimes wished you could give back, always making sure you had an extra couch to sleep on and enough blueberry muffins to keep your English group from completely hating you for being an hour late to your project meeting. They welcomed you back for the winter break with open arms and a freshly washed apron, reminding you if that first semester of teaching sucked that much, they’d only give you a week’s worth of shit for quitting and coming back to them.

You found Lexa, and everything she brought into your life. A makeshift family in the original diner table crew, a real one with her parents and brother who swept you right into their home the second you landed in the same city as them. A tiny trailer that’s too cramped during the holidays, but you can’t say no when she and Anya want a couple of the soldiers from their companies to have a place to get a warm meal away from home. A collage of pictures on walls and desks that you’re more than proud to share the stories about to anyone who asks.

Anyone but the people who live here. In this house, in this city, in this alternate timeline that you’re still trying to convince yourself is real and the life you lived just four years earlier. All the time you’ve spent dreaming about the day you could tell the story of your college graduation or you and Lexa’s first trip to Chicago, and the opportunity sits right there in front of you with Murphy waiting for any words to come out of your mouth.

“I needed to leave.”

“All about you, isn’t it?”

You wish he knew how hard it was to leave. How you pulled over eight times before you left DC, thinking you should just crawl back through your window, climb in bed, and suck it up and face the pain of having to go back to the hospital in the morning and sit by Jakes bedside. How you let yourself be wracked with guilt for months, to the point that you shut yourself off from everyone except the people you were forced to interact with at school or the diner, because you feared letting yourself feel happy while you knew everyone back home was suffering twice over because of you. You wish you could explain, but you can’t. Not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not ever.

“I’m going to the hospital in the morning. You can come with, unless you plan on bolting again on everyone. This time of year seems to do that to you.”

Murphy tosses his plate in the sink, crossing out of the kitchen and back to the hallway, the slam of the basement door muffling his footsteps down into the den.

“Do you want to stay here?”

Lexa speaks, barely above a whisper, as if she’s worried Murphy will come barreling back in at the offer to get out of the house. You shake your head, too heavy on your shoulders for you to actually look up at her and answer, staring straight at the half-eaten plate in front of you. Great Grandma Griffin’s dish has never survived more than five minutes in your path.

It’s tempting, to get away from the place, feeling like the whole house is seconds from collapsing on top of you. No more eyes from the pictures on the walls and shelves following your every step, no young and in love Jake and Abby on their wedding judging you, wondering how the puffy cheeked baby in the frame next to them grew up to be you. No hitting the third step on the stairs and hearing Jake sprint across the living room trying to catch a five year old you from toppling over the railing. No swearing you see Jake’s shadow coming around every corner, no matter how hard you close your eyes. Just cheap hotel sheets, tiny bottles of shampoo, and the off chance that Lexa might let you get a pizza delivered straight to your room.

But you can’t, because if you leave now, you’ll avoid the place for the rest of the trip. You’ll make a beeline from the hospital to the hotel, and eventually the airport. Leave no room for anyone to find you, or run into you, or be able to bum rush you without a copy of the keycard to your room. You’ll hide until you leave, whether it’s tomorrow or three days or three months from now.

However long it takes, either for Jake to recover from whatever it is that’s serious enough to draw you back home, or for the option that you won’t even acknowledge as an option, because it can’t happen. And if Jake recovers and gets to leave that hospital, you know he’ll be enough to bring you back to the house anyways. You might as well bite the bullet and get used to it.

“We’ll stay,” You don’t want to, but you will. “Let’s get our stuff.”


End file.
